"the few lucky companies that got pre-release access to its SDK?" The iPad SDK was available to anybody willing to pay the 100 bucks to get into the iPhone dev program. I myself had an iPad app available on the same day the public was allowed to buy the hardware.
I had an app for iPad day one as well and I was competing against a hell of a lot more iPad apps than Honeycomb developers are currently competing against.
And despite being outside the Top 100 paid apps in the iPad app store, I still made a few hundred dollars per day for the opening month. I wonder how many Honeycomb developers will be able to say the same.
