It makes me a bit nervous as well, and I don't have the professional necessity as you do.Im a little nervous now about shipping times to US.
Look at this email from Amazon. Copied from Sony Rumors
Since Sony hasn’t given us a date that we will receive and be able to ship these, we do not have a date listed. I checked on your order and it is still in effect. We are not allowing more pre-orders at this time as we have filled our pre-order slots.
AFAIK, the original Amazon listing and the Sony USA store are the only outlets that listed a ship date. All others say "coming soon". But since Sony is still showing a Dec 7 ship date, I'm cautiously optimistic the same holds for all retailers.