first of all the 1 million is a complete estimate and it may actually be a lot less than that.
though there's ever more early miners coming out of the woodwork it was effectively only him for quite a long time. if you were the only miner back then you'd be getting 7200 coins a day. that's one million coins in only 138 days and he certainly carried on for longer than that. i wonder how many people came on board in the early months of 2009. not very many.
this is a discussion that has been going on ever since price started to go to ~$20 and has been going on for years, and no matter how much you argue, there is no conclusion to it because bitcoin has a certain level of anonymity and we don't know how many were mining bitcoin from the start (for example Hal Finney was one of them)
follow up here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37333.0p.s. in the end bitcoin is still bitcoin