Although those few with the big rigs and shortest latency did get WAY more coins than anyone else, software made a difference for getting them in the first few hours also.

I've mentioned a few times that I use cgminer.
I got seven 1 share blocks in the first 33 minutes (my first was around 90 seconds from the start) with a 710Mh/s rig
Also my latency is just over 200ms
Rig network: PowerLine to Gigabit router (amber: 50-80Mbit), then Gigabit to linux router, then 100Mbit to switch then 100Mbit to ADSL router then 800Kbit to the internet ...)
So software choice clearly makes a difference too.

P.S. can everyone stop feeding the 'troll' and he will hopefully go away
(I'm not referring to anyone in this post of course)