The purpose of the Wave invites is so that they can fix scaling issues as they arise. Wait until its out of its limited technology preview status before you pass judgement on how it was launched.
If Buzz had been released with invites, I think that it would have had the same problems as Wave with no one checking it.<p>Both of them should be separate Google apps with Gmail notifications, but no Gmail integration. Wave could still have been invite-only for scaling reasons, but both of them would still have had better reception this way.
wave is all about starting from a clean slate -- not constrained to integrate with existing systems. buzz is all about leveraging gmail by adding broadcast and location.
I really think Google can, should and must win in this message-oriented social networking space. I'd like to see it win too. But between Twitter and Facebook, Google shouldn't become too dependent on either for fresh, quality content from the masses.<p>They stuffed up the launch: so what. Twitter had scalability issues for a long-time, it much worse than this, and not easily remedied.