Groucho on 15 October 2008
Convenient, in this day and age, that dev screwups can be fixed on consoles in this manner.
I imagine the 2nd printing of the game will not need to patch -- but I'm sure the first printing has already rolled off the presses, as it were. They can't delay it for the fix -- the problem was discovered after they had already rolled the game out for production.
Game discs for a retail game already have been made a good month (or more) before it hits store shelves. They go through a pretty long process of being packaged, shipped, shipped again, stocked, etc. By the time they released the demo, and users noticed the issue, they had already printed the discs for the first run.
