It's totally understandable that both Apple and AT&T would be completely unprepared for this. After all, neither one of them had the slightest reason to believe that a lot of people would be pre-ordering, so it's no wonder this caught them completely by surprise, leaving many of us struggling for what, an hour and a half so far?
Moreover, gosh, with thousands of people hammering their servers at the same time, how could anyone expect them to be able to handle that kind of traffic? It's not like they have massive servers and huge staffs, after all.