All you had to do was check every hour or so and grab one though. Despite the "constantly out of stock" status, we managed to buy 4 here, all within a week of deciding we wanted an additional one.
They've constantly been coming in stock and being bought up. If you wanted one, you got one. It's just people who checked once a week or once every other week and assumed there were none around.
I'm well aware of what had to be done. I'm one of the ones that obtained it on the first week of availability, and your statement that it was easy to obtain is just wrong. Most people that got cards in the first 1.5 months of availability had to continually F5 newegg, use the statusegg application, or use the instock.net webpage, or use the check4change firefox addon.
Maybe your definition of "easy to obtain" is different than mine, most people with jobs don't have hours to stare at their computer screen and F5 or constantly wait for their email inbox to show an alert. It was hard to obtain up until a couple weeks ago, period. You are right if you were hellbent on getting one and had a day off of work it wasn't so bad, sure, I guess.
The point is moot now since availability improved as of last week (maybe something to do with TSMC giving nvidia more priority) but it certainly wasn't easy early on unless you put a heroic effort into it -- until recently.