The reality is that when a retailer gets stock, they usually fill the backorders as much as possible until they fill them all or run out of stock again. The person was probably trying to imply that the demand was so high and there are so many backorders that it would take a year to fill them all.
I think that, to some extent, that this shortage is self made by nVidia. Unless they were late to finalizing specs or yields have been low, they should have been producing the GPU for months now, building up inventory.