I'm really looking forward to these shipping. The combination of high-quality graphics and networking will make it easy to build lightweight graphic displays and integrations with other physical devices. I'm thinking an HDMI dongle for making displays like Panic built ( http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/ ) but self-contained and configured from the cloud.
Does anyone know how they are planning to sell off the first batch?
If they do anything besides some manner of dutch auction they will be leaving a lot of money on the table for enterprising folks to pick up by reselling them on eBay.
Between the one-per-person limit for the first batch and moving to rolling production fairly quickly, the eBay inflation factor should be cut to a minimum.
The first batch of 10000 Model B's will be sold on a first-come-first-served basis.
They did also put out a call for mirrors recently for their OS image download. Possibly part of that effort went to distributing load for the shopping cart app. http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/683
They very likely have contract stipulations with suppliers / distributors / fulfillment service preventing Raspberry from committing to product availability at certain datetime, before said suppliers are indeed ready to go.