I am totally fine with this. The versions we have to work with at the moment are “good enough” (unlike Longhorn, in my opinion) and delaying the final release can only be good for the quality of the products. I think Microsoft has gotten a reputation for releasing a “gold” version of a product when it should probably be the last Release Candidate and have caused too many customers and businesses to come to consider SP1 the true “final release”. Hopefully Whidbey and Yukon (I guess we can safely call them Visual Studio.Net 2005 and MS SQL Server 2005 now) will be exceptions to this rule.
I hope this does not impact the “go live” licensing that was previously mentioned by MS reps. This would allow companies to legally release software into production (I'm thinking ASP.NET for the most part) using the final beta of Whidbey and the underlying framework.
[UPDATE via Jason Tucker, eWeek has an article on this with their usual mix of half-cocked speculation and facts. One of the facts seems to be that I got the Whidbey's name wrong, it will simply be Visual Studio 2005, w/o the “.NET“ part, which isn't really needed anymore.]