I wonder what will happen to the server farm they're using for Beta. Think they'll use it as a dev environment? And if so, I wonder if they would consider leaving it up and running when WoW goes live.
I personally think it would be a decent idea to have a test server running along side the prod servers for content releases and subsequent QC instead of piloting all the new patches in prod. And, of course, let us all keep playing for free cuz we're all such good testers =D
/dreaming