http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratingdetail.php?nick=slush but I'm not that sure that looking at how much some members of a company can be trusted to trade bitcoins OTC will give you an accurate hint on how much said company can be trusted to deliver a hardware product, even if I read The Post  

If you want the latest news, you can start browsing the code or at least the commit logs - then you'll see that the project is moving along quite well, with a full test suite now available.

You can plan as best as you can, delays are pretty much the norm when you manufacture hardware. Hell it even happened to the master of all things bitcoin

In my opinion pre-orders still help coming up with new hardware ideas having a significant design cost, but you should only take part in a pre-order for new setups growing from the developer community where the guys have a proven track record - others can, well, chase investors like everybody else does.