Last week upon hearing about the $200 price cut on the iPhone I noted on Twitter “I think Apple is about to sell it’s one millionth iPhone with this price cut. As in like tomorrow.” Well I was wrong. It took them 4 days.

Yes, Apple has just moved it’s one millionth iPhone, and it did so in 74 days. As Steve Jobs notes, by comparison it took them almost 2 full years to reach that mark for the iPod.

One million. A big number? Yes. Impressive? Yes. But as Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Apple 2.0 brings up, why did Apple pick today to announce this? You’d think a large media gathering would be a better place for such an announcement, and they just had one of those last week. Surely Apple had to know at the time about when they would hit the 1 million iPhone sale – so why did they not just say “and we’ll be shipping our 1 millionth iPhone next week!” Huge cheers. End of story.

Well, the ‘end of story’ is likely why they didn’t announce it last week. Selling 1 million iPhones is a cool number, but it’s more important to Wall Street. 1 million to them means Apple is here to stay in the cellphone business (as if there was any question after the hype was if not met, very nearly met, and that’s saying something with this product).

Had Apple announced it at the event last week it would have been lost under all of the other product announcements – and especially under the $200 price cut. Instead we get some fresh news, for a fresh week, and keep the Apple hype machine a-rollin’.