Based upon an informal survey of a handful of dealers here in the US, most are getting close to clearing their D800 wait lists (and those wait lists have some fairly recent orders on them).
NikonUSA has been sending a steady stream of these cameras in the last month, with most dealers getting more than just a few every two weeks or so. D800E models haven't reached that level yet, though. Wait lists still abound for this model (save your money if you work mostly at f/5.6 or smaller).
All those online outlets that opted to strongly push online pre-orders through affiliate programs don't seem to be close to catching up if my In Box is any indication. But pretty much everyone I've advised about how to get a D800 in the last month got one within two weeks by playing the dealer phone shuffle game right. What game is that? Get two lists: (1) Top 50 cities in the US; and (2) Nikon's Authorized NPD list. Scratch off the ones on list #2 that are in cities on list #1 and start calling around. Ask the right questions and you'll find someone that'll be able to deliver you a camera in a few weeks, if not immediately. Don't laugh. It works. And I've got a few dozen folk I've helped with this that can attest to that.
Given how good the camera is, I don't expect to find tons of D800 units sitting waiting for you on shelves any time soon, but I also expect that within the month we'll see Nikon producing close to demand, thus getting a D800 shouldn't be all that difficult by mid-summer.
That said, I'm a little concerned about quality. Beyond a couple of bugs in the firmware I've been able to find and a couple of questionable software decisions, out of the dozen D800's I've had a chance to look at, half have had some form of clear problem, including one of mine (AI-S index arm on my D800 does not work properly with many lenses). The left-focus problem still seems to be one of the QC roulette gambits users are facing, too.
Update: before people get blowing this too far out of proportion, it doesn't mean that half of the D800's being shipped have problems. It does mean, even with this small sample, that there are enough bad eggs out there that my sample is worrisome, which is what I wrote ("...I'm a little concerned..."). This hasn't happened with any previous Nikon DSLR that has been launched. This launch feels different, is all I'm saying.
At pretty much every Nikon DSLR introduction we get the "it doesn't focus," "it has problems," "it doesn't X right" complaints. I always try to investigate a handful of those personally to try to learn about things that perhaps ought to be in my books. In previous "it doesn't focus right" complaints I rarely found a fault; the problem could almost always be explained by something else (to be overly blunt: user error). I added that to the things I wanted to cover in my Complete Guide for the camera. This time is different. I've seen two bodies with clear left/right focus issues, one with a secondary mirror recovery problem. Add that to my AI-S arm problem, and two viewfinders not quite right (one shimmed wrong, one simply offset) and that's a lot of real problems to find compared to previous Nikon DSLR launches.
Statistically, you can't predict from a small sample (i.e. you can't say that because I found 50% of 12 bad, that of the 20,000 units in the US, 10,000 must be bad). However, calculating the other way you shouldn't expect so many problems in a small sample. If there are 20,000 units in the US and I sample 12, the likelihood that I should find 6 with problems is very, very low if there are few problems in the population being sampled. Of course, if there are a fair number of problems in the population, what I see becomes more probable, which is why I wrote "I am concerned."
That said, I've never known Nikon to shirk real problems. While they might not be wholly forthcoming about what was wrong and how many were affected, they always fix real problems (though my annual surveys show that it takes on average almost two trips to the shop to fix).
It's not different than before: Trust, but verify. Given the possibility (note I wrote possibility, not certainty) that there are some real issues lurking, every new D800 purchaser needs to make a thorough test of their new camera. You don't have to be anal about this, as some are being. But a quick focus test, a viewfinder accuracy check, and a quick skim through all the controls are probably warranted.