We will open the core sandbox and meta issue soon, once the above dependencies are resolved or worked around, so that contributors can begin to explore what it means for Views to be in core.
We are planning one last major sprint before feature freeze in the week preceding BADCamp. (Pantheon will be hosting this sprint; more details soon.) The BADCamp sprint will be our chance to coordinate our final push to make Views core-ready. Once Views is committed to core, all further work will take place in our sandbox and the Drupal core issue queue.