Logged in just to upmod you. They were on Twitter, Plurk, IRC, not to mention their site showed no bit of the load they were carrying.
MacRumors was smart about it. They had JavaScript that would poll for updates once a minute, and a little spinny thing to make the users think it was constantly updating. Far less load than having users refresh the entire page every 5 seconds.
Would have been nice to try comet out in that situation, it seems like a more appropriate technology
Comet is neat, but in broadcast situations like this it doesn't really matter if there's a delay, just like it doesn't matter that there's a 10 second delay for radio listeners.