Last night about 10pm I picked up an iPhone at the Bellevue Apple Store. It was a great purchase experience until I got home.  I plugged it in, fired up the Mac and upgraded iTunes.  Then I registered and... nothing except a message:

"Your activation requires additional time to complete."

You will receive an email confirmation sent to [foo] once your activation is complete.

Nine hours later, still no activation.  Looks like I'm not the only one either. Whoops, I realized Apple let me use my expired .Mac email address for the account.  I have another email I wanted to switch to so I called AT&T and was on hold for 30 minutes with no end in sight.  When I gave up and called back, went into another queue and was told I'd have about 10 minutes to wait.  I was super-pleasant with the CSR but it was clear she wanted me out of her queue- talking over me to the point I had to ask her to stop and listen to what I was asking her to do (she wanted me to sign up again when all I wanted was my email address changed).  She seemed really annoyed when I asked how long they expected it would take.  Her response, "There are millions of people trying to activate this phone, we have no idea".

Wow... I wonder if I'll see anything today. Hopefully Jobs is working the AT&T exec lines this AM. 

(Fingers crossed)  The design is superb but I can't do anything other than make emergency calls until activated.  You can't even use the iPod functionality.  I just want to play with what I paid for. :)

Update: 9:00am - finally activated :)