My thinking exactly.
I just did a cursory eBay search, and it looks like 500 MHz G3 iBooks (which is what the Henrico iBooks were) are generally going for between $150-350, depending on speed, condition and appearance.
So let's think about this. You had to have stood in line for at least seven hours to have been close enough to the front to have any chance of getting one of these things. Give everyone there a very rough salary of $10/hr, and that's an extra $70 right there. Now consider these are notebooks that are not just used, but have been handled by schoolchildren every day for four solid years, and who didn't even have to care about keeping them in decent condition because they didn't own them. So you can be sure that any of these machines put up on eBay would end up going for a price far closer to $150 than $300.
So in the end, any "winner" of one of these iBooks maybe saved about $30 in the real world. And if you one of the thousands who didn't get one, you're a good $10-$70 in the hole. Just silliness all around.
A check of completed auctions on eBay show that working 500MHz iBooks closed at between $212.50 and $511.50.