| We had two apple reps visit the studio where I work last week and, believe it or not, they said that apple had been totally caught by surprise by the popularity of iPhone apps, and the time it takes to get approved was due chiefly to the fact that apple doesn't have the infrastructure to push certification through faster. He told us that it would take about 2 weeks to get a dev certificate (with his help) and that the process had been intentionally designed to seem more formal than it actually is in order to dissuade a deluge of applicants from clogging up the system.
As far as development cycle goes - well, who the hell knows really. It is a bit of the old wild west garage days at this point. We designed an easy game in-house with 2 coders who knew zero about Objective C and had a beta up in about 8 days. /shrug
We don't have the game certified yet so I can't help there, but if we ever do I'll let you know how long it took and what was involved. | 