From someone in the know (i.e., within Opera software):

"[My] concept of "soon" is obviously different from many of yours, that seem define it in "before or after lunch". In the perspective of the project's lifetime it is almost done by now, in the perspective of something we would want to release it's really not ready yet.

"You would not want the Opera 7 of today, you would not want the Opera 7 of next week, and we would not want thousands of reports on bugs that are about to be fixed anyway"

(From the newsgroup Opera.beta via Google.)