For what it's worth my pre-order still appears to be coming on time (Friday morning). Admittedly I ordered it within 5 minutes of pre-orders opening. Any delays appear to be purely due to allocated stock running out (which, for a fairly popular physical hardware, doesn't sound _too_ far stretched - it still has to be assembled at a certain bounded rate, tested, allocated to one of the launch countries and shipped).
Even if we assume that Apple is run by baby eating evil megalomaniacs in marketing it would be a bit of a stretch to imagine that they are refusing to take your cash purely to demonstrate some 'artificial' shortage.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
