It all comes down to when the product was actually manufactured, and when the drive imagers on the assembly line were changed. Unfortunately it is very difficult to predict when these two things may have happened when ordering a product.
Complicating matters are the path that the product takes from manufacture (in Asia in most cases) to your door. If it is an established product (one that has not seen a recent change), then they are most often shipped via boat to a warehouse in the US, and then distributed from there. That can add weeks (up to 6) to the process (waiting on the docks for a ship, customs, time in warehouse). On the other hand, Apple does drop-ship some items directly to a customer from Asia, and that means less than a week from manufacture to customer.
And we don't really know when Apple finalized the 10.4 development product and declared the process "done". Then you add one or two days after that for the product management groups to add all the other software that goes into the image for that product and test it, and then however long they take/wait to actually install this new build on the assembly lines.
In the mean time, Apple has a long history of cracking open all of the boxes that it has on hand and simply tossing in an upgrade disk. This is not going to help you if you get drop-shipped a box that got finished before they had the disks on hand, but it is going to help you in any other case (and Apple will ship you the disk for $10).
Executive summary: there is no real way of telling without having the product in hand. People will start reporting this when they start getting the product, but even then it will take some time before you can be certain the the channel you are looking at is cleared of old product.
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