Well, I had a different expereince. I simply read the sentence off of the T&Cs exactly:
"The annual fee is waived for the first year for cardmembers that choose the annual fee card."
They forwarded me to "someone who can help you with the annual fee", and that person (after I repeated my explanation and that exact wording) said I would get my annual fee credited within 3 to 5 days.
However:
I then decided to review the terms, and while they said I'd get 30k points for first purchase,
they have no record of the extra 15k bonus points for $1000 spend being on my account! So they asked me to fax (or snail mail;
email of scan not accepted) the printout of the landing page with the 45k to them and to ask that "the terms be applied to my account".
So perhaps they were giving you hard time about the annual fee waiver because their system is confused as to whether you signed up for the 45k offer whihc promised to waive it or whether you signed up for some other offer that made no such promise?
In any case, I have a scan of the landing page, but I do not use any website where I can post that (and you can't post a scan directly to FT, you have to post it to some other site and then provide the link). If someone does belong to a site where they can post the landing page (in enough resolution to read all the fine print), and then link here to that posted scan, please PM me with your email address and I'll email you my landing page scan.