I asked. No reply yet, and don't really expect one. @nokiahelps have no idea either and @vodafoneuk (after initially pointing me to forums that don't even have a N900 section) have promised to let me know when it's released, but don't have any idea why the delay or when it might be.
I feel bad for the Nokia team who put their effort in to making the UK variant of the firmware only to keep having it delayed and prompting us guys to reflash to global.
Yes I'm an impatient hypocrite here, I've flashed to global..
I'm in the UK and I flashed to the global firmware to update to 1.3, but now I can't set up Mail for Exchange, doesn't even show up as a choice under service providers. Anybody else have the same problem?
So have I. Parts of Nokia initially gave this excuse with the previous delayed UK firmware, before falliing back on it being an issue on getting the images onto the right servers (essentially saying the Uk part of Nokia were incompetent ...)