Home Depot just started selling them and I lit one up. Its bright but not that much better than spiral CFLs in color. You could kinda see the blue LEDs behind the yellow remote phosphors.

Dave, do you means that the LEDs are blue and the YAG phosphors located on the bulbs themselves?

The YAG (and other) phosphors appear to be loaded into the material of the plastic bulb shell before injection moulding to form those parts.

I also just cut up some of these lamps for analysis - technically a very elegant design!  It is being heavily under-run to achieve the high LED efficacy needed to make the generation of 806 lumens possible for just 12W of input power, which is about the highest wattage that can be dissipated in the A60 bulb shape.  Each lamp contains eighteen royal blue Luxeon Rebel LEDs which if driven at normal levels would deliver many times more light than this lamp - but of course at somewhat lower efficacy.

In Belgium and France they came on sale last month with retail price of €60.  The ligting effect is superb, really good distribution and colour.  Also unlike all other LEDs, when you switch them on the light output only drops by 5% as they warm up, since the remote phosphor design keeps the phosphor cool.  In conventional white LED lamps as the phosphor on the chips warms up over the course of about half an hour, the luminous flux drops by 20-25% from the initial value.

This is the first mains LED lamp that I've seen that I'm really quite excited to have a look at - once I find one anyway.  They don't appear to have popped up in any physical stores around here yet.  If they haven't in the next month or so I might see if I can find one online somewhere.

Yes, the price is high - even compared to CFL's in the early 80s (the initial purchase price of the SL*18 equating to around GPB17 in today's figures if my reckoning is right), but they should last a good long while, and are one of the first lamps I've seen which look to be, on paper at least a real alternative to incandescents.  The slow warm up, switching wear and lack of proper dimmer compatibility have always been issues which have blocked many people from fully converting. 

I'll be really interested to see one of these in person and see what the light colour is like.  Just hope that they've got the lumen maintenance in hand, though if the LED's are underdriven and the phosphors are being kept cool, that shouldn't be too big an issue.

Definitely one to watch I think.

I think none of these retrofit products could even get close to the performance/cost of the dedicated fixtures (both fluorescent as well as LED).

In my eyes these are only "the best solutions of the challenges", that are completelly unnecessary and easily avoidable.
Way better way would be to invest the engineering effort to really improve what is necessary to improve (e.g. better improve the efficacy+cost+reliability combination - these days only two of them are possible to combine at once...)

@Medved: Dave probably refers to this lamp , that uses blue LEDs and remote phosphors.
James tells that with 12.5W, this lamp throw out 806lm (Similar to 60W incandescent lamp) and therefore 50lm/w system efficiency and 64.48lm/w lamp efficiency (Without driver loss, calculated with windows calculator).
This achived partially by underdriving the LEDs, so the LED operates cooler then normal increasing efficiency and lifespan and by keeping the phosphor cool by placing it on the lamp wall instead on the InGaN die, increasing its efficiency, for a total boost of 20% in efficiency compared to conventional White LEDs.
James, why the LEDs are deep blue and not regular blue like conventional white LEDs?

@dor123: I meant all retrofit lamps, what included not only the "Dave's" lamp, but and all others designed to retrofit incandescents.

What i mean, then e.g. using the same technique on purpose build fixture would offer higher efficacy (or even better color quality; partly, as there would be no other optics absorbing the light) and way longer life (as all components would run way cooler, due to larger available surface of the heatsink), possibility to reach higher power levels and lower manufacturing cost (whole fixture would cost at maximum the same as this bulb alone, while for the use of this bulb you have to add the cost of the incandescent fixture)