Last summer, WordPress opened their brand new Theme Directory with a whole bunch of themes. Three themes to be exact (Dum-Dum, Tarski, and Monotone I believe), with less than 1,000 downloads the first day. Four months later, after a lot of steady work by designers from around the world, the directory hosts 680 themes, with nearly 1.5 million downloads, a threshold that should be passed sometime later today.
(Click the chart to embiggen.)
Congratulations to WordPress for making the Theme Directory a success.
I can see some good wp themes coming up with the advent of theme directory.