What file and directory permissions do I need in my Features directory?
This is because Feature is doing something that's a little bit out of the ordinary ;-)

This is also one of the reasons I have my filesystem laid out as follows:

 sites/all/modules/
  - custom // Custom code.
  - contrib // The actual features.module is here.
  - features // This is for my Feature modules.


Because this means I can set the permissions on my Features differently to the contributed modules directory. Usually 760 I think. Then so long as the features directory is owned by a group that Apache is a member of, everything should work as expected. I do sometimes have to run a chown -R from my Drupal root, but that's because *nix admin has never been a strong point of mine.

Obviously everything on my world facing servers (read: not my local machine) is more secure than this, as should yours be.

That said, on my local machine I always end up forgetting something and just chmodding everything to 775 because I'm in a hurry.