With iPad pre-orders officially opened on Friday of last week, it would appear that customer anticipation is certainly high for Apple’s trend-leading tablet computer as its April 03 street date looms.

More pointedly, initial pre-order estimates offered up by the dedicated watchers over at Apple Insider suggest that Cupertino-based Apple Inc. managed to secure some 120,000 iPad pre-orders during the device’s opening 24 hours on the market.

Citing the AAPL Sanity Board at Investor Village, the Insider report also claims the multi-touch tablet computer enjoyed immediate impact with prospective buyers, who snapped up 51,000 units in the first two hours of pre-order availability.

If ongoing pre-order figures and launch sale projections from Investor Village are anything to go by, Apple can expect to shift a full 1 million iPad units by the end of the device’s second week on store shelves.

Should that level of retail performance be awaiting Apple’s iconic iPad, it will represent a significant upsurge when compared against initial Wall Street estimates that had suggested Apple would require a full year of sales to scale that particular peak.

With 120,000 units supposedly already marked and ready to go, two-thirds of which are thought to be Wi-Fi models, the current pre-order “guesstimate” offered by Venezuelan blogger-analyst Daniel Tello points to weekday orders of around 30,000 units with a weekend drop-off of 15,000 units.

Add Tello’s prediction to the 120,000 outlined by AAPL, and Apple may well have shifted more than 600,000 iPads before the device’s formal launch.