First: At the people predicting a christmas or new years release. You need to keep in mind a few things: Software projects never get finished on time, under budget, and to the quality you would like, something always gives; the time required for integrating different systems and bug fixing are not very predictable and take longer the writing the things in the first place did. I'm not saying that it'll take years more before we see the release, Toady has been doing those things along the way, just that we're getting down to the point that all that is left if integration of all of the different things and making sure it works, that might take much longer then hoped for; and if you convince yourself that it'll be out by the end of the year you'll be disappointed when it isn't, but if you convince yourself that it won't be out by march then you'll be pleasantly surprised when it comes out new year's eve.
I'm not saying that it's impossible just that it is so very unlikely that it'll make it, and it's safer to assume that it won't. I know, you guys are saying "if everything goes well it'll be out by X" but even if you aren't getting your own hopes up, you're getting other people's hopes up who only noticed that somebody said "it'll be out by X".
Second: Who ever said that the cheetah was the fastest animal? it's the fastest land animal, and only the fastest sprinter on land, the fastest endurance runners are things like horses and antelope. (the kinds of things that cheetahs, and other big cats, prey on) Furthermore, land animals don't have anything on aquatic or flying animals. That's just a fact of physics, swimming and flying are more efficient movement methods, each time a land animal's foot hits the earth they lose energy. Swimming and flying don't have that issue, they can store up more energy each time they make an accelerating motion.
tldr: stop getting people's hopes up for early release dates and the cheetah is only the fastest animal with a sufficiently reduced set of animals for a particular definition of 'fastest'