The best I hear is Q2.

Don't they generally release VS in April?

Based on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/default.aspx  it seems September 16th is the day.

I guess with the launch of the Metro UI shebang MS wants to sync it with the launch of Windows 8...? (On the other hand, one could argue that they should give devs a good lead-time to develop new fancy apps using Metro...  )

According to my estimate based on previous release cycles, the release date will be somewhere around September 9th. See my blog post for more details on the estimate: http://blog.johannesh.dk/2012/06/estimating-vs2012-rtm-release-date.html

Visual Studio 2012 already? I can barely even use 2010, because I took virtually all of my programming classes a year or two ago, when DeVry University was still using XP and 2008.