New product announcements from large tech companies make it to #1 before getting any comments on a regular basis. Submitting a duplicate URL counts as an upvote for the original submission, so it's pretty easy for something like this to make it to #1 just from people racing to be the first one to submit it.
Ah, I didn't know about the duplicate URL rule. That makes more sense. I've been here for quite a while and I haven't noticed such an aggressive advance before. So it triggered an alarm. Maybe I'll start seeing it more often