It's pretty obvious to me most of the people in this thread still complaining have never worked in IT or as programmers. From what I glean from the e-mail, it appears capacity problems were the main problems.
Rollouts are notoriously difficult to deal with, especially when new customers are signing up every hour. If Apple would have rolled this out in stages (for example, let .mac customers have first crack at it), all those with trials would be complaining why it's not up yet or that "Apple missed the ship date again".... it's a slippery slope either way.
It's one thing to do in-house development. It's another thing to provision what you think are enough servers to handle demand. I don't think anyone predicted how popular this service was actually going to be and Apple were fighting tooth-and-nail to get .mac moved over and up to the level of service required by the new service.
If you over-do capacity, you run the risk of never fully using those servers and that costs money, not only in maintenance but in electricity, rack space, etc. It's a lot easier to undershoot and make customer service deal with it the few crazies while things level off. Most customers will be understanding when this sortof things happens. Still pissed? Go rent your own private server for, what, $400/month and you can get all the push-everything you need.
