That computes to around 515 applications per day. Can't really blame them for taking too long, eh?
Yes, you can. Apple could easily afford hiring 250 people to review applications - at 2 applications a day, they should be able to thoroughly test apps the same day they get them.
With >600% YOY growth in iPhone sales, margins of approximately 36% and quarterly revenues/profit of $8.3/$1.2 bn, I think Apple can afford to hire and train plenty of people.
Recruiting, training and retaining 100 employees at a salary of $48k/yr - which seems like a pretty good starting wage to me - would only run them about $8-10 million a year, or ~0.2% of that profit margin. What the hell, double that amount if you need to rent/build a new office block for them. It would still pay itself in terms of positive press and developer relations.
40 reviewers each testing 40 apps per day is absurd, that's less than 15 minutes each. OK I know a lot of iPhone 'apps' do only one thing and have a novelty half-life of 90 seconds, but still.
They wouldn't have to train so many if they easily allowed 3rd party app stores. If you don't like the wait in Apple's official store, go to the alternative. As long as they insist on being the bottleneck, this will be a problem.
More people = less consistency. A common complaint among developers has been the inconsistency of approvals, where one app may be rejected while another one with similar features is improved.
Right now the approval delay is about two weeks - that's not bad. Your testing cycle should be longer than that. An extra two weeks should not be a big deal.
Update: Though, there is this at the end: "In little more than a year, we have reviewed more than 200,000 applications and updates."
That computes to around 515 applications per day. Can't really blame them for taking too long, eh?