I was sitting at amazon waiting, thinking they'd go quick (but not as quick as they did) and ended up having to go to a class before they started the preorders, so left a friend in charge lol, but he managed to get one in for me. Ended in like 8 minutes or something apparently though.
Saying that, the Wii U preorders online were almost the exact same here in Japan too actually (me thinking they may go quick, but no where near as quick as they really did), with the deluxe systems being sold out all over the net in an instant, with all online shop sites responding incredibly slowly from a sudden burst in traffic haha (but I did end up finding a monster hunter limited deluxe pack a few hours later which was strange and ended up going with that as I wanted the deluxe system, but I've still not yet played that game once >_<)