I don't even understand people giving any date in 2012... Alpha didn't even start :/ We're in October. Less than 3 months for alpha/beta? Not going to talk about the PS3 version as well.

I'll bet for Spring 2013 :d (Not Australian Spring please ><)

1. Cost tons of money to run 2 data centers running to 2 games (FFXIV and ARR). Ending in November would be the smart choice so they don't have to keep 2 data centers up the whole time and saving game data.
Why everyone assume that renting servers cost a lot for MMO providers? It doesn't. What costs is manpower. Bandwidth/servers are way less than 10% of costs (at least it was less than 10% for NCSoft, and bandwidth included everything, game servers + their websites/forums etc. Figures here.)