Identifying someone by their race is not bring racist........eg " a group of Americans, three Italian men, one Irishman, four Chinese"....so I really don't think the OP was being racist.
The facts are however, that the scalping issue is largely due to Asian people being employed to buy iPads that are then sent east and sold at a profit. I imagine this is really annoying to the American folk who cannot get one due to being greeted by large groups of Asians every time they try to go to purchase. In truth, the scalpers could really be from anywhere, so its not the fact they are Asian that is annoying, but the iPad is not available everywhere in the world yet, so scalpers tend to be from these countries...eg..scalpers wont get much more in UK for an iPad as it is released here already. Last week (before 25th March) it was a different story as they were selling for at least £100-£200 profit over UK RRP.
I think Apple should have card only payments for US citizens, or cash plus some form of ID with address on it, and only 2 per person. This would weed out the scalpers (wherever they happen to hail from) and give the US customers a chance to buy one first,,,as Apple intended by releasing it there initially. They are an American company after all. Personally if I repeatedly seen the same faces in a queue at my local Apple Store every time I wanted to (and unsuccessfully ) buy an iPad I would challenge them, or at the very least complain to the store manager in a good enough way to warrant a skip from the queue and wave it in the scalpers face as I walked by whilst they still waited in queue!
