The iPad Goes International

Some 1,200 people waited in a half-mile-long line outside Apple's flagship store in Tokyo this morning in anticipation of the international iPad launch. "I wanted to touch it as soon as possible. I felt real excitement when it was finally in my hands," one man tells Reuters. The device is currently on sale in Japan and Australia; iPad fever is set to hit Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Britain and Canada later today.

More hype: In Australia, a fashion designer arrived to a launch party wearing a little black "iDress" with pouch in the front to carry the iPad. “It was inspired by the pouches on kangaroos and koalas,” she tells the Wall Street Journal. In the basement of Paris’s Louvre—the Apple store is in the museum complex—the iPad line dwarfed the line for Mona Lisa, reports Business Week.
(More iPad stories.)