It's certainly not the disaster of the century, that's SWTOR just based on the sheer amount of money they spent on it. The other disasters would be AOC, WAR and VG, though I wouldn't know how to rank them.
TESO is going to launch soon, as in this year. Once they start doing the convention circuit, you know they are coming soon. I would say it launch before E3 2014 easily. If I had to guess, it launches Q4 2013.
Be it's pretty easy to guess, with a good chance, that this game will really fail to live up to expectations because they have shown absolutely nothing so far. I expect games that are showing this little to be 2-3 years out. They are talking about a launch that is sooner than that, and all they are showing are videos of people in first person picking up vendor trash from the ground?
They should be showing gameplay videos. Here's another red flag: they banned cameras from video taping their PAX East demo. BANNED. That should raise a giant red flag the size of Ut's mouth. I'm an uber optimistic guy, but I know how to read between the lines. I have very little hope for this game from how they have been handling their PR. Shit that info dump they did when discussing their game for the first time was ugly. For a game with the Elder Scrolls logo on it, it was panned almost entirely across the internet.
Hell the masses are savvy enough to lol at them for saying "Hero Engine".
From what we've seen and read so far, this game is going to be average at best OR it's going to be amazing and somehow Zenimax hired the worst PR/Marketing people ever.