Remember all the fuss about how many G1 units would be sold? Well, The San Jose Mercury News landed a sit-down interview with the CEO of HTC, and he shed some light on how many the company is expecting to sell.Peter Chou, who's also HTC's co-founder, said he expects to ship about 600,000 thousand G1s by the end of the year. While it's nowhere near as impressive as the 6.9 million iPhones that Apple shipped last quarter, it's still a very respectable figure for a brand new operating system that hasn't really gotten a big media push yet.

Another interesting tidbit:

Q: Does Apple's marketing actually help a company like HTC by expanding the number of potential customers worldwide for smart phones?

A: I always look at the positive side. I think Apple definitely made this market segment a lot more exciting with a lot of hype. And we are excited about that. It means people believe in our vision, which we started more than 10 years ago. But we need to be able to differentiate ourselves in the market. We approach the market differently than Apple.

Q: How do you convince potential iPhone buyers to get the G1 instead?

A: HTC products are very pragmatic and productive. We have spent a tremendous effort to make our product better. ... It may not be as sexy as others. But it's very nice, very mature and a very good experience. It has a very good quality keyboard, which makes it thicker. ... It's very good for text messaging or e-mail. .Americans are very keyboard-oriented.

I just received the G1 in the mail and have been playing with it for a few hours. It's pretty nice so far, and I'll definitely post an in-depth piece later about the pros and cons of the first Google phone. In the meanwhile, do we have any G1 users out there? What's your take so far?