Well, I'm back from the Apple store. All told, the whole process took about 3 hours, including the 5 minutes for activation and paying for the phone.
While standing in the continually growing "reserved" line, next to the far shorter "walk-in" line, I observed that people who had joined the walk-in line long after I arrived went into the store way before me, and when I entered the the store, those people were nowhere to be seen, meaning they stood in a short line, bought the phone, activated, and were outta there before I even got in the store. Based on these observations, I'd venture a guess that if you were a walk-in this morning, at the 14th St. store, you spent roughly half as much time in line as someone who reserved a phone, maybe even less. A bad joke indeed.
Lesson for next year...if you live in NYC and plan to get on the line fairly early, don't bother reserving a phone. (they'll likely have plenty of phones anyhow) You'll only be bypassed by people who just walked up and got in line.
