Apple released a press release this morning announcing that the Mac App Store has already reached one million downloads. I know that I contributed to that one million number and I’m certain most of you reading this did as well.

Although, there is no announcement as to how many of those downloads were free. MacRumors spoke with David Frampton of Majic Jungle Software, the developer behind Chopper 2, who revealed that Chopper 2 sold nearly 30,000 copies yesterday alone. This, of course, isn’t going to be the experience that every developers has — Chopper 2 ranks #2 on the “Top Paid” chart and has an established following — but it does show the potential of the Mac App Store.

The folks behind the popular image editing application, Pixelmator, are so confident in the future of the Mac App Store that they’ve decided to transition the sales and distribution of Pixelmator to the App Store exclusively.

From the transition announcement on Pixelmator’s weblog:

To ease the transition to the Mac App Store for our users, we’ve come up with an exciting solution that we think everyone will love taking advantage of.

They’ve decided to sell Pixelmator in the Mac App Store for a limited time at $29.99 and those who take advantage of the offer will get a free upgrade to Pixelmator 2.0 when it becomes available.

I wish that Apple would make it easier for developers to transition their customers to the Mac App Store-versions of their applications. I wonder how many of those one million downloads are by users who just want the automatic updates through the Mac App Store. But, luckily this transition only has to happen once. Pixelmator’s idea of essentially charging the upgrade price through the Mac App Store is brilliant and hopefully other developers will follow suit. I certainly don’t want to re-purchase all of my applications just to receive updates through the App Store, but if I’m also buying an upgrade that I would have had to pay for anyway it takes a lot of the sting out of that purchase.