Couple of things that should answer most questions that people are asking about the 5.6 Release status:

• TimeLine: Stuff is syncing around, it could be upto another day before you see packages, tree and isos on your local mirrors.
• Updates: Yes, it includes all updates released into the distro and most updates from that point on ( exceptions: java packages, subversion and openoffice.org ). These 3 package updates will come through in the next 24 hrs, but due to the churn in the mirrors, might be a few more hours before they are publicly visible on a mirror near you.
• LiveCD: Yes, the LiveCD's for i386 and x86_64 are also included
• Plus Kernels: Yes, the plus kernels are included in the release with no delay.
• Torrents: Torrents will be published as soon as the release is announced. This is to work around the situation where people will download the torrent and use yum to hit mirrors that are not completely updated as yet. Causing non-trivial issues ( as they end up installing 5.5 pkgs that then need to be updated again ). So once the bit-flip happens, we use the mirror status monitors to workout the state-of-external-mirrors, once there is a reasonable number in sync, we will release torrents, publish md5sum and sha sum's for the isos and announce the release.
• Update Announcements: There will be individual announcements for all updates released since EL5.6 was released upstream. There will be no announcements for packages rolled into the distro. So in a nutshell: it will be the same as its always been for CentOS-5.
• Will you need to change anything on your machine to get 5.6 ? : No, once its released and publicly available everywhere a regular 'yum update' will move your machine from centos-5.x to 5.6

Please keep in mind that till the release is announced ( keep an eye on http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-announce, things can still change.

And finally : If you dont run a public mirror listed as a centos mirror, please do not rsync from the centos.org machines for the next 3 to 5 days. Use a large pipe mirror near you instead.

Update: CentOS-5.6 is now released