Yes, but it has always been that way. Last time I didn't buy at Apple directly and the reseller was as fast as Apple was in 1998.
It also makes total sense from a face-value calculation: order at Apple, get your thing fast, order at somewhere else and 'they' will not be as good as Apple. Apple wins, reseller looks bad. This is obviously not Apple-specific, nearly any direct+reseller channel combo has the same thing, it's mostly consignment channels that are less problematic (from an ordering perspective... they are so much more problematic from every other angle).
I'd understand that if ordering directly was an option. Many countries don't have that option, so what's the point for just making the experience of those customers worse?
Probably because again, they don't gain anything from cutting their own direct sales in favour of pretty much anything else. They don't look at a local market of a single country, but mostly at the global market, which is what you have to do at Apple-scale. Sure, their 'home country' gets extra attention because the people that make the corporate choices live there so they will be inherently biased, but that's mostly just resulting in launch priority for products, marketing and locations for physical things like meetings, events, buildings etc.
The production lines, money and most customers are everywhere except the starting country.
It also makes total sense from a face-value calculation: order at Apple, get your thing fast, order at somewhere else and 'they' will not be as good as Apple. Apple wins, reseller looks bad. This is obviously not Apple-specific, nearly any direct+reseller channel combo has the same thing, it's mostly consignment channels that are less problematic (from an ordering perspective... they are so much more problematic from every other angle).