Yes, that's a b as in billion, and one and a half all within the past year. Even when you consider that a healthy percentage of those downloads for the iPhone and iPod Touch devices are certainly free in cost, it's still an astounding number of apps to have been processed, far more than I think anyone anticipated. Other details released by Apple today include the  number of Apps now in the store - 65,000 and the number of developers creating them - 100,000. With other companies including Research In Motion, Google, Nokia, Palm, and Microsoft all following with their own Apps markets, Apple CEO Steve Jobs felt bouyed by the number to release this statement in reference to the competition:

"The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality" says Jobs in the released statement. "With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up."