They should be dishing out large scale % refunds to people who couldn't play for 'x' days. I know people will say it was only a couple of days, but the bottom line is the game should have been playable the date they said it was going to be available. If I pay good money to play on release date I expect to be able to play on release date.
The fact this happens all the time is no excuse and shouldn't be used as one. They obviously won't dish out monetary compensation though, instead they dish out online content.... which is useless for anyone not interested in playing online.
Our fault for preordering and expecting to have what was promised delivered I suppose.
Edit: Latest PC patch is available, 2.91GB.
I think the differing views that players have about the severity of it boils down to what the individual player has become used to over the years, for example, almost every single MMO released has been a mess on day one (and often for the entire first week of release), with servers collapsing under the strain, servers being offline for hours and hours at a time, entire game functionalities just not working and so on and so on (everyone remembers the mess of things like World of Warcrafts early weeks where you couldn't log in for 10s of hours because of queues and when you did get in you kept falling through the world and you couldn't loot any bodies etc), its happened with almost every MMO release ever. So much so that its become quite a standard thing that you absolutely do not take a week off work for an MMO release because chances are you will barely be able to play anyway.
The upshot of that is that players who have a strong history of MMOing have quite a lot of tolerance/acceptance of things not running at release. Other players who are used to smooth launches generally in their game choices think differently of course and have better expectations. Like many things, rightly or wrongly, a players acceptance of it all boils down to what they have become used to.