They keep saying holiday 2011 as their window of release but its looking less and less likely.
now this is hearsay, but i was in the last beta session and others i was playing with were given actual dates, aug 8th to dec 8thish. So late December at the earliest for a release.
It is definitely playable in the form it is in right now, but there are still quite a few bugged missions and minor things that don't work right or simply don't work at all. They seemed to be concerned with server stablity as on the weekends it would get pretty laggy in crowded areas, (and this is without chat bubbles implemented)
the boards seemed pretty divided about chat bubbles as it apparently existed in an earlier iteration but was such a huge performance hit, they took it out. I'm hoping they put it back in (as an option) as the game is somewhat solitary not being able to casually speak with anyone except in the 'general' spatial. which pops up fleetlingly and is pushed away with the flood of group seeking spam.
have i said too much?