ATI has shipped tens of thousands of HD 5870 cards at launch, as the whole point was to launch them in last days of Q3. Since the card was launched in September they could simply please their investors by claiming that this was a Q3 launch not a Q4 launch. More importantly, the HD 5870 was available in hundreds of thousands a week after launch, but due to high demand and the fact that Dell got a better piece of the shipment, there were still some shortages. Naturally North America got more cards than Europe and it doesn't look like that you will see many cards available anytime soon.