Which means you can play today. Looking at the patch notes only thing that you have to wait until tomorrow for is the campaign. (OMG THE TRAILER IS AWESOME!)
Indeed

. I'll definitely wait until after launch to start any modding though. Needs to be at least v1.0. Then I'll dive in. Looking forward to it. I'm also more than happy to help with mods. My strength lies in art assets, skinning and textures. I had lots of help with the code to make my skin mods work and the Dragonlance Team backing me up to get our Elemental mods working. I'll be needing some help with coding this time around as well surely, so anyone interested in needing art hit me up.
I'd like for the "Ultimate Sci-Fi War" mod to be a community project if we can get it going. Adding all the races and ship designs from everyone's favorite sci-fi shows, but keeping their abilities and racial bonuses within what's already in the game. We can take the best of the best ship designs as voted on by everyone here on the forums (with their creators permission and credit for them of course). Flavor text and all that is easy to change. Changing ability scores in xml is easy enough. Not sure how easy the diplomacy screens will be as they're animated this time around but I've already seen a user (don't know the name yet) with a cool looking Federation diplomacy screen human. Haven't checked to see if it's animated or not yet though.