Windows 7 General Availability date announced - Mark your Calendars 

Today, we announced that Windows 7 will be generally available on October 22 of this year. That's the first specific date that's been announced for the product, and more specific than the "this holiday season" announcement that was made at TechEd last month.
They also announced that the product will Released to Manufacturing in the 2nd half of July - just 6 weeks away!
GA means the date you'll be able to buy a machine with Win7 on it, or pick up a retail box in stores. It will likely be made available earlier to TechNet/MSDN subscribers, or customers with some sort of Volume License agreement with us.
Looks like there's also going to be something called the Windows Upgrade Option, so that if you're buying a PC to take to school, you'll have an inexpensive way to get Windows 7 for it without waiting till October.
There's lots of Windows 7 content here on Edge already, and more to come between now and launch, keep an eye on the Windows 7 Tag to see it all. You can also subscribe to our Windows 7 RSS feed.

For those of you more interested in the Server release, Windows Server 2008 R2 is a joint development effort with Windows 7 and we are aligned with the same RTM and General Availability (GA) dates. So that means Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM code is on track to be available to our partners sometime in the 2^nd half of July with broad availability about the same time as the Windows 7 GA date of Oct 22.

You can see more details at the Windows Team Blog, and the Windows Server Blog.