They announced in the keynote that the iPhone SDK had been downloaded over 200,000 times. Of those, about 25,000 people applied to the paid iPhone Developer Program. Of those, they have accepted only 4,000 applications. One of those was mine. I’m feeling pretty good about that right now.
Most people are still stuck running their apps in the Simulator. Let me tell you, it just ain’t the same. Not even close. Until you have your app running on the device, tweaked, memory-leak free, and optimized for CPU utilization and battery life, you ain’t got squat, just a hobby app that might as well be a toy. I thought my app ran great in the Simulator. Then I got my certificate and ran it on the device. A hundred hours later I feel it is reasonably decent. And still more work to do. The next time will be easier, though. No more n00b mistakes. But that first time, it’s a challenge.