I’m sure the guys at the Googleplex panicked at the perspective of having to deliver a final version of Android, without those years-long beta test phases that are so common in Google products

That’s definitely true. The Beta tag has always been an “out” for them. What’s even more interesting, however, is that they aren’t going to have the widespread number of testers like they normally do for their products. They’re used to receiving a lot of feedback for their products, but this is something that very few people are going to be testing out. Guess we’ll really see how good their Quality Assurance people are.