Three to four weeks by barge, another week to go through the Best Buy supply chain.  They also may have held the Wii's a week or two to have a national advertisement for Best Buy.  Lastly, we all know Nintendo is stock pileing.  They may be issuing some of their stock piled Wii's and saving new production Wii's.

That's very slow, maybe it is because of the stockpiling...

No they put them in bottles.

@Gling
I was gonna go with bottles, but then I thought that they probably couldn't fit a wii in a bottle. Unless it was some weirdly shaped bottle I suppose.

Yeah, thanks for that. I should have considered that this would only be one link in the supply chain.

I don't think this is correct...

Before Christmas I saw a report which talked about 20 days for USA. 10 days of shipping by boat, plus 10 days to get the units to the shelves. Here it is:

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7965&Itemid=2&limit=1&limitstart=0

Last Christmas, they used air-shipping which probably cut off 8-9 days off of those 20.

Off the top of my head, this is probably the steps to getting the Wii to North America:

1. Manufacture
2. Sit in warehouse at factory
3. Ship to port
4. Sit in a warehouse at port
5. clear customs
6. Load onto boat
7. Ship to North America
8. Sit in a warehouse at port
9. Clear customs
10. Sit in an intermediate warehouse
11. Get shipped to retailer
12. Sit in retailers warehouse
13. Get shipped to store

Now, each of these steps can take days or weeks to complete ... and items in a warehouse are not (necessarily) shipped in a first-in first-out manner so the delivery time may not be equal for all systems.

On top of that, if Nintendo was building a stockpile throughout the year for the christmas holiday season and shipping inventory in a fifo manner there might be a several week (or several month) delay between a system being completed and being shipped to the port.

So the thread should be called "Wii takes 3-4 months to assemble and ship", I guess?

Interesting, both the OP and largedarryl's post (thanks for that). So chances are that despite this it still probably only takes a month or so for a Wii to arrive, right? That would mean the supply crunch here in the Americas should start dying down, since production was increased about that long ago (or was it only an announcement that they would increase it?).

There's no way any product in the world, let alone one that depends heavily on stock, takes this long to ship under any circumstance, using any means, route or vessel on the globe. Just no way.