Steven Sinofsky announced yesterday at the MSFT MGX conference (for MSFT employees who are sales people) that Windows 8 will be available via retail channels and generally available on October 26th.
That means you’ll be able to walk into Harvey Normans, PC World, Best Buy and so on, to buy a new Windows 8 PC, laptop, or ARM tablet (if the manufacturers do their part), or get Windows 8 upgrades (going for $14 or $40 depending on when you last bought Windows).
And remember that volume license customers will get their hands on the ISOs sometime soon after the RTM which was previously announced as being in the first week of August, just 2 weeks away.
Watch out for news of local launch events in a few months time.
Meanwhile, the Microsoft Store where you can download and buy Metro apps for Windows 8 will “go live” when RTM rolls around. There’s some interesting stuff (free and limited trial) on there already and it appears that there is more that will be available at RTM time.