It looks like Apple will live up to its promise of July delivery for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Once the company last month refined the due date from (northern) summer to July, there wasn't much risk that it would be late.
This week has seen the release to developers of a golden master version of Mountain Lion, so unless any showstopping bugs are discovered, we'll see the new incarnation of OS X in the next few weeks.

Will 10.8.0 be bug free, even to the extent that bug-free software exists at all? No. 10.8.1 will be with us soon enough, but in the meantime let's keep our fingers crossed that any shortcomings that do actually affect early adopters aren't significant issues.

At this stage, I'm planning a reasonably prompt upgrade to Mountain Lion - certainly more prompt than my repeatedly delayed move from Snow Leopard. Here's hoping I don't regret it.

If you're hot to trot, make sure you've got around 4.5GB of your monthly Internet quota to devote to the download, as there's no indication that Apple will sell copies on thumb drives as it eventually did with Lion, though I'd be surprised if that option doesn't materialise.