Here's a posted Gabe Newell made over at Half-Life2 Fallout.

It's been a little over a day since the test release went live at cyber-cafes. We've been looking at the crash reports as well as the bug reports. There are fewer issues than we thought we would get, so we are on track for the broader deployment on 8/18 (pre-loading on 8/16). This is good news for our overall Half-Life 2 release as we aren't seeing any pernicious stability, performance, or compatility issues.