Nope, in fact they specifically said they hope to get players into the Beta... Soon™ :P

Actually, you can remove the ™.

From a Tankspot interview with J. Allen Brack:

Q: So everything looks to be at least mostly along in development. One thing mentioned during the presentation was that 4 or 5 of the zones are already fully quested out. Does that mean we could be looking at a beta sometime soon?

It does, yeah. We’re still trying to figure out when the beta is actually going to happen, what the rules for that’s going to be, how we’re going to invite all the people that are going to be invited into the beta, but it is something that we’re interested in getting into players’ hands as soon as possible. We’ve got zones that are fully quested out and we feel like we’ve got a couple in the pipe at this point. We’re starting to think about “when can beta be, what can be the timeframe for that? What do we need to do in order to get ready?”

True, the quote I was looking for from MMO-Champion was:

"We are excited to get players into the beta very soon, because that is going to be the true test of whether or not it is awesome." -Tom Chilton.

Beta is going to be a mess. They will let people into it in "waves" which will result in a few very happy people and a lot of anxious unhappy people. Oh, of course the guys who get in the last wave who become haters of Blizzard.

Because, in reality, everyone who bought into the year subscription probably feels that they deserve to get it at the same time their friends do.

There are over a million people signed up on annual pass that will have to be given beta invites. Its insane to let them all in at once, and worse yet, its counter-productive to testing.

The vast majority of them are just going to look at it to say they got an early sneak peak, play for a week at most and go "this is buggy, I don't get to keep any of this, why am I wasting my time on it?" and go do something else.

Thats why semi-public testing like this is done in waves, because they know they'll get a big upswing for the first week, and then it'll die down to almost nothing but the actual hardcore testers, and then they'll have to bring more people in.

If you've never beta tested a game, I'm sure this will be a new, horrible experience for you. For the couple of days it takes you to go "Dude, this sucks, thats the third time this week they reset my character!". Vast majority of people just have no concept of what beta TESTING is. They think its a sneak peak at the game, not, you know, WORK.