Thanks, Pert. Title of my original post edited to reflect it's just the US store. 
The board itself seems solid, and the network connect time for the NB modem is delightfully short. However, the lack of official SMS support is a bit dismaying. On a whim, I did a quick-and-dirty port of the GSM SMS library for the NB 1500 -- and it worked! I was able to receive SMS's using my Hologram data card. However, as I feared, the story was too good to be true: using any type of SMS operation seemed to either lock up the board/modem completely, or at least prevent it from opening up a TCP socket for outgoing messages. Going back to a pre-SMS state seemed to bring it mostly right again. I also just received a Particle Boron, which uses the same modem. Guess what? No SMS support there, either.
Hey, like you said, it's the price of being an early adopter of the shiny new hardware. Hopefully it gets sorted out sometime; it's certainly a big enough issue where I won't be the only one who would like to see it fixed.