As of right now, the thing that pops up when you get to Apple.com is a full-screen promo for the iPhone SDK. Revolutions are coming, because the little computer in your pocket is finally getting the training wheels off — Apple’s letting for-reals development commence on the iPhone.

The announcement video is amazing. No question that this is going to be a big, big deal. EA took two weeks to get a working demo of Spore running on the iPhone. Salesforce.com got an enterprise productivity app going, based on its web backend. SEGA rolled Super Monkey Ball onto the iPhone. Epocrates has an innovative program helping doctors at point-of-care. And to top it all off, Apple erased 99% of enterprise’s issues with the iPhone by making it fully compatible with the ubiquitous Microsoft comms juggernaut Exchange Server. Push email. Push contacts. Push calendar. Just like Blackberry, only sexier, and no need to round trip all your data to RIM’s Canadian servers.

Verily, the iPhone SDK is revolutionary. Even Kleiner Perkins thinks so — to the tune of a billion dollars worth of VC.

But here’s the weird thing: everyone who’s tried to get a dev license so far — tried to pay for a dev license from Apple, which Jobs said you’d be able to do and which is advertised on the site itself, has gotten a rejection letter from the company, saying the program is too full right now. ZDNet and Tuaw have both noted the phenomenon, with ZD going so far as to ascribe motive to Apple:

I’m not surprised at Apple’s “greet and toss” tactic – greet the high-profile big-name commercial companies and invite them in under the velvet rope, and toss out the riff-raff who were going to make their products available at a price (or lack of a price) that would mean that Apple wouldn’t be making money off the products.

I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think that the certificate system isn’t ready yet, and that Apple thought “might as well give people a head start on dev, even if we can’t let them sell for another couple months.”