Blizzard Quotes:
Most machines are lent to us by hardware vendors. It’s in our interest to have our games look good and run well, and it’s in their interest to show off the latest and greatest their company has to offer. So generally they’re top of the line, using all the newest and best hardware.
Because we’re working with a pre-release version we work with the hardware that’s going to be on the show floor to build a final show floor build. The game hasn’t hit (obviously) final QA and hardware compatibility testing as it would before release to the public, so we need to ensure it’s going to run smoothly on this one specific set of hardware for the show.

It can also help, to a degree, overcome some potential technical hurdles we could run into with a pre-optimized build of the game. Throw more CPU/RAM/3D processing at it, and generally those pre-optimized problems won’t throw a wrench into the brief glimpse of a game that isn’t finished yet.

So, the combination of having hardware vendors showing off the latest and greatest, coupled with our interest to have a unoptimized version of the game look good, leads to show floor specifications that are probably way beyond what even the final “Recommended” specs for the game would be, let alone “Required”.

Diablo III Demo System Specs Revealed
Thanks to fmulder doing his usual detective thing, we’ve got the system specs for the machines that ran the Diablo III demo at the G-Star convention in Seoul, South Korea, in November 2010. This was the same demo build that fans got to try out at Blizzcon 2010, and we can assume the machines were fairly similar, though probably not identical. The details have been added to our Diablo III System Requirements article in the DiabloWiki, and they are as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i7 870 (45nm, Soket 1156, 2.93GHz)
Motherboard: Intel DH55HC (intel H55)
RAM: EK Memory DDR3 10600 2GBx2EA
Video Card: GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 460 1GB WindForce or ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 1GB
Hard Drive: Seagate Momentus XT 500GB
Power Supply: Acbel iPower 500
Case: Bestech Guardian
Monitor: Orion TopSync 24
Some hardware experts in the forum thread estimate that this system would cost around $1000-1300 USD right now, and will undoubtedly be quite a bit cheaper by the time the game is release.

That said, the systems at a show demo don’t really tell us that much about what the final game’s system reqs will be, as Bashiok explained back in 2009.

Diablo.Inc Gamers

i doubt its minimum, its either recommended or higher

wow, if thats the game minimum requirement...then GG lorr

nah.. core i7 for minimum? please kill me.

even a lousy model bearing the name of i7 would turn ppl off.

i think core 2 duo would be sufficient. after all blizzard is known for making games that do not need good specs

Some hardware experts in the forum thread estimate that this system would cost around $1000-1300 USD right now, and will undoubtedly be quite a bit cheaper by the time the game is release.

At the end of an otherwise forgettable preview in the New York Times, Blizzard game director Jay Wilson was quoted as saying that development on Diablo III is near complete.

    We’re definitely in the home stretch. We’re crunching. This is when the magic happens.

Hopefully, that would mean there's a decent chance that the leaked release schedule was legit, and Blizzard's newest hack-'n'-slash dungeon crawler is headed for release by the end of the year.

Spotted on Blue's News.

Blizzard Quote:
The 3rd quarter reference in the earning’s call today was a calendar quarter, meaning that we’re aiming to launch the Diablo III beta between July 1st and September 30th. Keep in mind that it’s our current goal, and of course that can change as development continues.