The AT&T "direct fulfillment" debacle has many hopeful Iphone 3g users at their wits end. Just a sampling of the orders that have not been able to be fulfilled shows that the Iphone may be on backorder for many many weeks.
As an example, I chose a relativly small town to sample from. I chose the town of Summerville, S.C. which is a suburb of Charleston, S.C. From the single AT&T store in this town there are currently 77 orders for Iphones. Out of those 77 orders only 16 have been shipped and 61 are on backorder. This is a poor 20.7% fulfillment so almost 80% of the customers who used direct fulfillment are still waiting on their phones.
To add insult to injury, all shipments have been stopped as of 7/15/08. Out of the 16 orders that were shipped, 1 was shipped on 7/13/08, 7 were shipped on 7/14/08, 8 were shipped on 7/15/08, and ZERO were shipped on 7/16/08. One can only assume that if zero Iphones were shipped yesterday with such incredible demand, that the supplies of Iphone 3g have been completely exhausted.

AT&T originally estimated a 2 to 3 day waiting period for orders to be filled from "direct fulfillment". Their newest estimate states 7 to 10 days and there are rumors now that the estimate will change today to 3 to 4 weeks.

I guess the worldwide (21 countries) release date wasn't such a good idea after all.