Here is a recent interview with me for Tom's Hardware, where I talk about Qubes, why virtualization alone does not automatically bring much security, and why we need it for secure systems anyway, and all that kind of stuff. Nothing really new, but still might be of interest to some readers.

As for Qubes Beta 2 release -- it really is coming, but we've faced recently some very nasty, race-condition-related problems with new Xen (we bravely switched to Xen 4.1 in Beta 2) that seem to occur on machines with very fast SSDs and we're currently trying to see if we can solve them, or should we instead revert back to Xen 3.4 that we used previously in Beta 1. Except for that, Beta 2 is mostly ready, so we should be releasing it within coming weeks.