Well it certainly looks like we got their attention.
MS announced this on their blog:
Finally, the other big question I am seeing is about the rollout schedule for Japan. Specifically, why isn’t the Japanese market receiving IE7 via AU until this spring? The Japanese market faced unique challenges due to their highly decentralized IT organizations. Our customers and partners in Japan told us this added to the time required to get ready for IE7. We listened to them and decided to hold off AU distribution in Japan until further readiness activities could be completed. Simply put, Japan faced challenges that we did not see in the North American or European markets. In the mean time users in all markets can download IE7 in all the languages we’ve released.
alas, no climb down.
read more:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/200...c-updates.aspx