People are free to expect what they want, of course. They probably didn't give a timeframe because the majority of the community has some fundamental misconceptions about the nature of open development and they take any kind of timeframe as a binding contract between them, CIG and God.
It'll be done when it's done. No one's entitled to anything more. The fact that people can play at all before it comes out, or before it's in late beta, is something that you won't be able to do with other AAA quality games. Of course they'll run into delays and problems when they're just developing something out of scratch. If it was a normal game, it probably wouldn't even be announced yet.
