Why do they take the store down for so long? I would have thought that they would set up and validate the new content on an offline copy, and even do a dry run of the update process using offline copies, so that the real update could take minutes rather than hours.
Given how disruptive these store updates are, and the fact that this is worldwide, I'm really hoping that Apple will use this outage as the opportunity to open up iPad pre-orders for the next countries to get it (e.g. the UK).
- Julian