You don’t have to bookmark your country’s Apple online store URL, which is lengthy and no-so-clean. I don’t find any reason to see WebObjects in every URL.
Not a problem at all for US residents. You can visit http://store.apple.com or http://apple.com/store.
For Japanese, you can visit http://apple.com/japanstore. Apple Japan Website is located at http://apple.com/jp, but you can still type in the old address http://apple.co.jp.
Going to the store directly helps me a lot because Apple has been putting auto-starting QuickTime movie ads on the home page, which aggravates me quite a lot.