Not the 'first' beta, and a better feature list
This isn't the 'first' beta of F12, it's the only beta. The schedule includes an Alpha release, Beta release, internal release candidate builds, and final release. This release is roughly equivalent in terms of quality and stability to what was shipped as the Preview release for previous cycles.
It's disappointing you seemed to focus on some rather...esoteric features from the big feature list, rather than just printing or excerpting the list we provided with the Beta release announcement, which your readers can see here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F12_Beta_Announcement
we tried to focus that on the changes that would be most interesting to the widest cross section of users. Fedora is not primarily a server or enterprise product, it's a desktop distribution, and our careful selection of features to highlight was meant to reflect that. For instance, rather more current and prospective Fedora users are likely to be interested in the substantial changes in graphics and audio support than the virtualization stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with being a virtualization geek. =)
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey