The Beta is going on right now and the release date was “end of 2011”. Knowing Blizzards tendency to not rush things they’ve pushed their release date back to “early 2012”.

The positive side of things is that the beta testing will be longer than expected so the chances of you getting to play it a little earlier if you’ve opted in have just gone up! If you haven’t opted in yet and want to try to get in on a piece of the Blizzard testing pie, check out their Opt-In and FAQ.

It may not clash with the release of SWTOR, which probably is something Blizzard was looking forward to (detracting from people playing SWTOR over WoW) but I’d rather D3 to be more polished and finished when it releases than if it were rushed out the door to meet their first release date guess.