I still have not received my confirmation email and "track order" part of the store has been down. This was amusing the first couple of years, but by now they should be able to handle this load a bit more gracefully. They know exactly how much demand this will put on their systems and they got to practice, what 5 times now? I got past eligibility part uneventfully, so they cannot blame AT&T for this.
It's a tough situation. Do they build up enough server capacity to eliminate bottlenecks when demand spikes to what is probably literally 1000x the average volume? And if they do, spending all that investment just for 1-2 days a year, then what? Orders go smoothly and dummies sell Apple stock because clearly demand is way down from the past, because there were no outages.
Creating the illusion of scarcity is a powerful marketing tool. Especially when it's not an illusion. It's hard to imagine the business case for beefing up the capacity. They won't sell one fewer iPhone. There is literally not a single person who wakes up at 3 AM to buy one, fails, and then decides to buy a droid instead. So what's in it for Apple?