The gang at The Inquirer have an interesting editorial up today on the status of NVIDIA’s most recent product launches.  The 7300 GS was announced this past week, but no cards have been found.  The quad SLI configuations were shown at CES, but you can’t buy them yet even at Dell.  And those 7800 GTX 512s are still mighty hard to find. 

So the birth of the 7300GS may have been announced already but the hardware itself seems stuck somewhere in the birth canal.

It won’t be out in retail for at least two more weeks.

Does it make it a paper launch? The last time Nvidia gave me and the rest of the journo pack its sermon on paper launches, it claimed that a paper launch is when you release the specs of the card and ship them at later date.

Nvidia came down hard on us humble hacks, suggesting all of us should put more pressure on ATI over its R520 availability – or lack of it. ATI was aware of heavy delays and admitted as much in front of the 100+ journalists. ATI took it like a man, said it’s late and promised rather realistic availability dates for its new chip. It differed approximately a week from the promised date.