It actually didn't ship in decent no's to many launch countries till the beginning of Nov.
There was huge debates in the epic N9 thread about poor availability, and what was going on.
We worked out there was some kind of "ramp-up" issue in the main factories, it was eventually resolved.
So by mid-Nov/Dec limited distribution had mostly been rectified for the 1st countries.

Oddly enough, the Lumia models did not appear to suffer the same "ramp-up" issues.
But they were only delivered to a few countries to start with, but so was the N9 (it was phased etc).
Dunno......