So the steam servers are pretty bogged down right now, and it looks like this first patch is going to take me something like another 3 hours to download. I've already been waiting for 4 hours, it's like I'm living in my own personal hell. Do any of you know if the launch patch is up for download through not steam, and if so, where I could get it? I'm pretty certain at this point that it would be significantly faster than waiting on steam. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

If you get the game through Steam I believe the patch is already in the initial release.

Have you tried changing to a different download region (settings>downloads+cloud)? Sometimes Steam doesn't auto-detect the correct region for you, or another one is faster.

DPB is right. I was getting 3 kb/s until I started trouble shooting. After checking the server I found it had autodetected a remote server. Changing it boosted my download to 175 kb/s. It should be finished soon, whereas before it was saying coming back in a week. Go to steam support, search for Skyrim slow, start trouble shooting if this is not your fix.