Yes, this is really happening.
Aurelia has officially put out its first beta release dubbed beta 1. Just a little over a week ago the team put out a pre-beta release and now we have our hands on an official beta as promised.
As an added bonus, the Aurelia team has also beaten the Angular 2 team to the punch and released to beta first, even though Angular 2 has been in development considerably longer. It goes to show a small agile team can do great things (like release faster).
With the beta 1 release comes a whole plethora of bugfixes since the pre-beta release with ongoing fixes being released.
Due out this week is documentation as well which should help lessen some noise in the Gitter chat from people unsure how to do something in Aurelia.
As a testament to the team, there are very few times where the lack of documentation was ever a roadblock due to its easy-to-use nature. The sharing nature of the community also made it easy to learn about some undocumented method as well.