What often happens, simply because of the logistics of production and preparing for distribution, is that the bugs discovered during beta get addressed in the first patch to be produced as close to launch as possible.
It takes time to create the disks, packaging and stockpile for shipping so that part of production is usually well underway during the latter part of a beta.
It is quite possible that the coders have been working on a patch for the last month or more already.
That's my understanding of the general process anyway. I could be wrong, I often am.
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