I signed up for Apple Card yesterday. It took only a few taps. I keep my credit frozen so at one point I got a clear message telling me just that and the credit bureau (trans union) I should go unfreeze. The entire process took only a few minutes.
I used the card this morning with Apple Pay and it was all good.
This is why Apple has a good chance of doing services, specially financial services, well. Not because Apple will be great at it but the others are so horribly bad. The bar is so low that Apple, even with its software lethargy, will still be significantly better than everyone else without even trying too hard.
The real hope that is that this will pull up the rest of the financial industry as Apple has generally coaxed the incumbents in the markets that it has decided to enter.