Kindle Fire seems to have had a very successful launch. According to screenshots leaked by Amazon.com employee to Cult Of Andoid website, 254,074 devices has been preordered from Amazon.com. This means that rougly 2,100 Kindle Fire devices have been ordered every hour on average. This translates to Kindle Fire being ordered slightly more often than every other second.
This is substantially more than 95,000 units estimated by eDataSource research firm. eDataSource estimate is based on aggregated analysis of almost 1 million email accounts that it monitors for sales receipts. Historically eDataSource estimates tended to be on the lower end compared to actual sales numbers revealed by companies themselves or estimates provided by other research firms.
While I personally doubt that Kindle Fire will outsell and replace iPad, I’m impressed with the good start that it got.