One week after the iPhone’s launch, the lines of impatient buyers have disappeared. The Apple Stores and AT&T stores have gradually begun restoring iPhone inventory, much to the heartbreak of those who bought extra units last week in the hope of scoring big profits reselling them on eBay.

Nevertheless, the iPhone’s first week as an available product was a busy one. Initial sales estimates for the weekend alone started at 200,000 and quickly climbed to 500,000, with Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey estimating 700,000. Meanwhile, some Wall Street observers were calling the iPhone a disappointment because it failed to sell 1 million units in its first weekend. Patience, my friends: according to the waitingforiphone.com Web site, AT&T Mobility had activated 1 million iPhones by Thursday (once AT&T recovered from its system overload that delayed activations for hours or even days over the weekend). And investors certainly weren’t registering any disappointment – AAPL has risen 8.4 percent this week to close at $132.30, on top of an already impressive 44 percent gain over the first six months of 2007.

Still more interesting numbers came from technology industry research firm iSuppli Corporation, which disassembled an iPhone to determine its cost of manufacture. They came up with a bill for materials and manufacturing costs of $263.83, leaving Apple with $333 of profit per each $599 iPhone, a margin of about 55 percent. The margin on the $499 version is slightly less at 52 percent, but Apple can take comfort in a survey by Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster that found 95 percent of the first-weekend buyers preferred the pricier model.

Putting all the numbers together, it appears Apple made a profit of well over $300 million from the iPhone in its first week. Of course, now that most of the fanatics have their iPhones, sales will slack off somewhat.

But I wouldn’t expect them to drop off a cliff. Throughout the week one tech critic after another – not all of them Macophiles -- praised the iPhone as worthy of the pre-release hype. What has impressed them is not so much what the iPhone can do, but how it does it. Most of its individual features are not groundbreaking, but Apple has made the iPhone so easy to use that anyone can figure it out. It is, at last, a cell phone that’s fun to use, and that’s what will keep the merchandise moving.

Drawbacks? Yes, the iPhone has some, but they’re not severe enough to outweigh the device’s benefits. Use of the faster 3G network would be great, as would more flash memory for storing music, among other quibbles, such as the tricky touch-screen keyboard. But Apple can and will fix most of these in time. No doubt overworked Apple engineers even now are laboring on amazing future versions of the iPhone in a skunkworks on the company’s Cupertino campus.

And as if being a blockbuster success were not enough, eventually the iPhone also will be remembered as a product with historic implications. Other cell phone manufacturers for years have tried to sell innovative phone designs to the major carriers such as Verizon, only to be rebuffed. Now that Apple has shown that a fresh approach to the hardware can sell, many analysts expect cell phone makers to have much better luck convincing the carriers to give them more latitude in designing new handsets. The iPhone could very well change the cell phone industry as we know it. Wow.