It Appear that JL was right after all...

[omgwtfbbq]

Saiyar said:
Nintendo shipped 20.05 million units as of dec 31st 2007.
Nintendo themselves say that it takes 3 weeks to get from them to retail floor in US and EU.
Given a monthly production of 1.8 million units this means that at any one time there are roughly 1.35 million Wiis in transit around the world.
This gives us at least 18.7 million units on retail floor as of dec 31st. It takes less time to ship to Japan so the number will be a bit higher.

VGChartz has the number of Wii sold at 19.07 million. Seems pretty accurate to me.

Nintendo tripled their distribution workforce for Christmas. You'll find that the time between shipped and sold during the end of december would have been much lower.

The number of units "shipped" also depends on how Nintendo defines "shipped". Is it shipped as soon as it leaves their workshop? Or is it shipped as soon as it arrives in the retailer? If it's the former, there could be a big gap. If it's the latter, then the gap will be tiny, since I doubt any retailers will have been holding back =)