Another really important benefit of this delay is players will have three starting zones to choose from.
Spreading out the population will mean fewer day-1 servers will be necessary, and the load on zones will be more spread out. I wonder if part of this change is a kind of fail-safe, so if they can't figure out the item storage related lag they introduced to Night Harbour in time for EA at least players are a bit more spread out.
I'm real curious to see how far along Ail'Voreth (spelling?) is after the length of time it is taking Falindral to get polished up. Four extra months is really not a ton of time...