Robert Scoble just chimed in on the XBox 360 shortage:

Lots of people are saying we did this on purpose. That we limited supplies to make hype bigger.

Yes, Microsoft has gotten its evil back! For a minute there, I thought Google had taken over our evil.

But, come on people. We’re making them as fast as we can. Our suppliers simply can’t make anymore. Have you ever worked on a manufacturing line? I have. There are physical limitations to how many boxes can be made. There are physical limitations to how many boxes can be shipped (ever study the world’s airline cargo capacity? We have.

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This basically matches up with what Greg Stein said and just plain makes sense.  My apologies for being aggressive on the posting earlier.