Why would you hold back extra stock? By holding back extra stock they are losing sales NOW as well as incurring costs to house these extra units. If you ship everything you have NOW, you turn that into sales and anything that isn't sold is sitting on RETAILERS sales floors, not your warehouse floor. You then ship out more inventory when it is available since you are allegedly producing at max yield for those customers who will be purchasing in December. If you ship out your second shipment on the Nov. 22, those will probably be hitting store sales floors the following week on Black Friday Nov.29 just about the time when everyone will be doing their shopping.
If this were true Sony would launch the PS4 in Japan this year. Cutting them out only shows they needed to do this to try and meet demand. But guess what, with this brilliant scheme that Sony has announced, everyone who wasn't able to get a system on Day One(week one) because you held them back are also out there trying to get the console...so now mom/pop/grams is battling Johnny Gamer for a console and mom/pop/grams is SOL since Johnny Gamer is the one who camped outside their Best Buy for a day and a half waiting for that initial shipment, store opens at 9 am...all 20 ps4' sold out by 9:30am...mom/pop/grams goes by at 6pm after work...oh well...