Informative post, I can confirm a lot of the same experiences and frustrations except we had a much different experience with timing. It definitely DID NOT take 2 weeks from start to finish for us.

They must have improved the developer approval process and bank contract processing significantly. It took nearly 7 weeks for our bank contracts to get approved, and we used a major int`l bank - Wells Fargo. By the time it was all said and done, our first app took over a month to get on the store.