At this point, I would agree that's pretty typical. Heck, I've had a beta production sample OPPO Digital BDP-83 in my den since last September, with just one hardware change around November, but the firmware took until May to be ready for consumer use - and that's with a pretty darn strong team of programmers that were closely coordinating with their chip vendors. Likewise, the R-972's design has been sufficiently hardware-locked that they manufactured one or two runs of them a month or more ago.

The design of analog and digital audio and video components is comparatively straightforward (manufacturers have been refining those design processes for decades), but these things are purpose-built computers now - and that's a whole different deal.