An unofficial count of the pre-ordered iPads sold on its 1st day that orders taken is nearly 120,000 units, based on the order numbers given out to customers.

The team at Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity board based their estimate on a sampling of 99 orders over 19.5 hours, not counting units that were reserved but not ordered.

They arrived at this number by starting at 124,596 orders placed for Apple Inc. products Friday. They then subtracted 16,500, which is the average number of online orders on a normal day. They mulitplied by 1.11 — the average number of iPads ordered per customer — and came up with 119,987 iPads ordered on their first day of availability.

The group also found that the less expensive Wi-Fi-only model which will be delivered on April 3 was preferred over the 3G model by about 2-to-1. There was little difference found in the numbers who ordered 16 gigabytes, 32GB and 64GB.

Victor Castroll, an analyst at Valcent Financial Group who helped crunch the numbers, estimated that the first day sales brought in about $75 million in revenue for Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL).

Apple has an 1,800 employee facility in Elk Grove. A call center and shipping are part of the operations on Laguna Boulevard, according to industry leaders. Apple does not detail employee and operations for specific sites.

via BizJournals