Well, it took a while but I got an iPhone 3G on launch day here in the UK.
I'm not normally one of "those queuing people" but I was on late shift that day and have 2 Carphone Warehouses and 2 O2 stores (the UK partners of Apple) within 100 meters of my flat - did I have anything better to do? Probably not.
The stores opened at 08:02 (a play on the O2 network name) and I headed out just past 7am. The O2 store in Kensington's mall seemed to have the shortest queue so me and my book (Terry Pratchett's Making Money) joined at the end of a queue of about 15-20 (only one of which was a woman).
As the store was the main thoroughfare out of High Street Kensington Station and I worked nearby, I wholly expected to see people I knew walk by (and I did) and in any case I was joined by a colleague who'd decided to come to work early to queue too.
The store opened on time but o2's systems had collapsed under the load of credit checking, checking for existing customers' ability to upgrade, and a wholesale collapse of their activation abilities.
It took about 15 minutes to process 2 people (let in to the store bit by bit) so it took until just after 10 to get my new iPhone 3G 16GB - if you were much further down the queue you would have missed out - the 16GBs were in short supply and we were only lucky that a delivery of 4 more came while we were queuing.
Fortunately we had a good chat in the queue and all the people watching was superb - lots of people going by thrying their hardest not to look curious about why there was a big queue here :)
The customer service was orderly given the circumstances and the store manager did a great job of keeping the queue updated on the availability of the different models. As I neared the front of the queue, the queue went down a bit as people had to rush off to work or left because of the lack of available 16GB models. As I left, mainly women were in the queue - either not fussed with the 16GB version, or maybe just wise enough not to get up early!
Back home, I wasn't expecting the phone to be activated until at least the evening or the following day (as it turned out - after o2's systems were up and down all weekend - it didn't activate until 32 hours later) but fortunately no problems with Apple's servers at that time so I had a fully functioning wifi browsing machine - just no phone.
Supposedly the number transfer from my old network (Orange) will happen by the 16th - 5 days after I gave them the number transfer code. A long time but I have my old phone in the meantime and my iPhone with a temporary number too.
All-in-all, an alright experience - much better than in the US (where Apple's downed serves left quite a few "bricked" iPhones around) and here at Apple stores (where Apple staff weren't used to O2's systems being down).
