The problem with wide-angle photography is that it's... wide. That is, if you point your camera at a random subject, you'll get a lot of things inside the frame. Some of them will very likely be dark, others will be light, some will be near, some will be far. This introduces all kinds of complications, and in fact turns many of the usual rules, techniques, and even desirable lens characteristics on their heads.

Lens characteristic	Telephoto	Normal-range	Wide-angle
AF speed, accuracy	Critical	Highly important	Unimportant
Bokeh	Important	Important	Unimportant
Performance wide-open	Critical	Important	Relatively unimportant
Performance stopped-down	Unimportant	Important	Critical
Flare characteristics	Unimportant	Important	Highly important

Relative importance of some lens characteristics at different focal lengths.

With telephoto, depth of field is narrow, the long focal lengths make hand-holding tricky, and you're often shooting subjects that don't stand still. This means that fast and precise focusing is critical, bad bokeh has a really unpleasant effect on most pictures, and you'll be shooting your lens wide-open most of the time, to minimize camera shake. On the other hand, the narrow field of view means that you can use deep hoods to very effectively cut out glare and reduce flare. In other words, when shopping for a telephoto lens, you might want to trade off some optical quality for focusing speed and accuracy -- or pony up the extra for the snappier of two otherwise equal lenses (e.g. Canon 70-200/2.8L vs Sigma EX 70-200/2.8).

With wide-angle, the situation is largely reversed. We will soon see why.

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