they claim last part of 2006, but I think they'll be late. there are too many bugs as of now. of course, they will most likely do it like XP(more patches than operating system)
no those versions are legal. they are all early builds of the OS for evaluation/debuging puroposes. you must buy a subsciption to Microsoft's MSDN to get it. the final version will be much better than those beta builds. There is a lot of Vista bashing lately,wich to me is strange because how can you say something is crap when you have not used it.