I'm gonna try to report my facts without opinion here.
After being surprised and dismayed that neither Costco nor Radio Shack had either the D4 or any clue when the might have a D4, I paid $99 to amazon wireless beta on launch day, and received my phone on Monday.
And that was when the trouble started. I could not activate my phone.
After a few calls to Verizon and Amazon, I finally found someone who had a clue - someone at Amazon who got in touch with someone at Verizon - who was able to get me connected.
That all took me a few hours. But ignorance in customer service is almost a culture of business these days - there are literally executives who believe that the best way to manage customer service is to not tell customer service reps the truth, whatever that truth may be. I'm not exaggerating - I have worked for these people.
Ultimately i think the problem was that i selected my office as the shipping address before i arrived at a page that explained in uncertain terms that to avoid fraud they could only ship to the billing address, but at that point there was no way to change the shipping address, or at least i had no obvious incentive to tell them to please have my phone sit on my porch for several hours while i work 38 miles away from it for several hours until it is too late for me to contact verizon customer service if i need them.
Verizon is still under the impression that my office is my billing address, which is untrue, and the website won't let me change it until I've been through a billing cycle. But i don't particularly care.
At any rate, it turns out that amazon only managed to forward my credit application to verizon. I received, on friday night, a vague email from amazon stating that there had been some sort of issue with my order and that i should try to activate my phone when i get it, and if that failed, I should call verizon.
The really interesting part of my conversation with Amazon Wireless Beta on Monday was when the enclued CSR took me off hold briefly to verify that i did in fact have my phone already, and explained that his system was under the impression that my phone had not yet been shipped. I found this interesting as the impetus for my call had been to inquire why i had been unable to activate the phone i had received.
ultimately my D4 was activated and my Amazon Wireless Beta CSR informed me that my number port was in process and might take a couple days since they usually initiate it when the order is received.
Today i called Verizon to ask how much longer i have to carry around two phones and was informed that the number porting process had not been initiated. After some awkward supervised communication with a phone robot i was told by my verizon CSR that it would take between 1 and 24 hours to port my number, and about 5 minutes after i hung up my number was ported.
Between the home dock and the navigation dock ($40 today from amazon w/ the Y cable), any money i saved by going with amazon was spent at amazon. I am convinced that this is all part of jeff bezos' evil plan for world domination.
