Waiting for Google Wave

I am a complete addict for new shiny techy geeky things, I'll cop to that. Because this Summer was fairly busy I didn't really notice the bruhaha over Google Wave until a couple of days before the invitations were sent out. When I saw it I was full of squee, and applied, but knew there was little hope.
And then lo and behold a friend of mine got one of the invites ("I've got a golden tiiiiicket") and was not so immured to my begging and pleading as to say no, so he nominated me.
That noise you hear? That's the sound of crickets.
I haven't gotten the invite, nor have most people who have been nominated from everything I can figure out. Contrary to popular belief, I do know that at least one person got a nominated invite, as above mentioned friend nominated his SO and she got an invite right off.
I understand why Google is taking it's time with getting invites out. However I think that it would have behooved them to go about it a somewhat different way, for instance give out 20,000 original invitations with say 5 real and actual invitations to give out directly. They would have gotten less dev people and coders, but they would have gotten people using Wave the way it's intended right off the bat. As it is, my friend has not really been able to explore Wave because no one he knows (other than his SO, with whom 'turning the head and talking' is a much better communication tool) is on Wave.