Missed this earlier, but I spotted on ValveNews that Jenni from Valve sent a response to I.Am-Half-Life about Randy's posts about problems with the patch (story):

• The last time I checked we had 950 HL servers running, and expect that number to go up as the day progresses. (At our high point we had gone from 0 to 1000 servers in less than 24 hours, which makes us very happy. :-))
• We're sorry that the update overwrites any existing TFC autoexec.cfg file. We didn't anticipate that this would be such a big problem for people, and next time we'll make sure the update creates a back-up.
• The reason demos recorded under previous versions of HL don't work now is that we had to make a trade-off to address the fact that a lot of people using cable modems weren't able to play the game. (To fix their problem we had to make a change to the network protocol.)
• All of the Half-Life mods are working with the update. (We posted 8 mods to our mod server yesterday.)