If intel wants to give me some work the address in the EULA for the SDK is within commute distance. I think the suggested retail price is around $99 which is about the same as the Kinect so that seems realistic. I think they are shipping this year.
More/better/cheaper depth cameras are also a good thing for VR development. You can do a little bit with Kinect right now but I'm looking forward to the day when I can set up 3+ small but relatively high resolution depth+video cameras around a room and combine the information to create a live 3d model of the space. From there it's a matter of compressing, transmitting, and decompressing this data to be displayed on a VR headset in another location and you'll start getting into 3d telepresence (the real "killer app" for VR in my opinion).
With the drone the scan space doesn't overlap and it only needs to detect obstacles not fine details. It's trickier when they are scanning all sides of an object at the same time because the projector structured light patterns will tend to interfere with each other.
I wish the cameras were available to buy at a reasonable price and there were Linux drivers - hope Intel see your blog post and give you some work!
People are going to do awesome things with these in robotics applications.