Did Asus Ship Eee PC Prematurely?

In the article "Life on the EEEdge: Daily life with Asus' tiny laptop" Computerworld writer Eric Lai claims the following -

"Unwilling to miss the key Christmas season, Asus was forced to ship the Eee with an incomplete BIOS, and it's got several problems: The USB ports don't run at full USB 2.0 speed; Skype videoconferencing doesn't work, and the BIOS doesn't support the motherboard's 100-MHz front-side bus. That effectively restricts the 900-MHz Intel Celeron processor to running at just 600 MHz.

Asus has released a BIOS update that supposedly fixes those problems. But early testers say the update also causes the Eee to freeze and crash. As of early December, the new BIOS remains unfixed and unreleased."