If anyone out there is thinking of buying D&D 4e because they want to use the online tools straight away don't bother, as they are not available and won't be for some indeterminate time.

Despite the unavailability of the tools, there is NO mention of that fact on the Wizards of the Coast Dungeons & Dragons main page.  There is a rather ambiguous announcement in the ampersand column buried deep in the website http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dramp/20080609

You can read more about it here http://forums.gleemax.com/forumdisplay.php?f=878  

Even if I were to switch to 4E (which I'm not, Paizo's Pathfinder RPG for me), The only feature of the DI I'd be even remotely interested in is the Character Visualization, all the "Play Online" stuff doesn't interest me. And don't get me started on Gleemax...

Unfortunately for WotC, the fact that I have Poser means I won't use their Character Visualization program, if I want a picture of my PCs or NPCs, I'll crank out a much better looking Poser image of one.

And the poor quality, and infrequent uploading of anything not specifically a 4E preview these last few months (regular updates to the E-Ghosts of Dungeon and Dragon magazines stopped around October-November) leads me to conclude that the company's D&D division doesn't have it's digital act together and will perform as poorly with their DI as they did with the WotC produced 3E metal D&D minis (I think they sold for a year or less before the shift to Chainmail...).

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If you're joking that's just cruel, but if you're being sarcastic, that's even worse.