I was curious if anyone knows the deal with the Infamous 2 Beta. Is it full on Beta testing, load testing, balancing and/or tweakings or simply one of this generation's many glorified demos?

I'm mainly curious about the amount of actual testing going on and if the recent PSN outage will effect it's release date or not.

"beta" is now just a word for demo. Or thats what I think. 

It's not a beta for the game, it's a beta of the mission maker or whatever so people can see what it's like.
I've been waiting a week to be able to download the damn thing.

It's a little of both, from what I understand. If you make missions that are really awesome, they'll actually be in the game when it comes out.

Considering it's something the team hasn't done before I daresay it's an actual beta. If it were a glorified demo I'd say they'd be distributing it a little more widely than through random e-mails and the ilk. There's always the added advantage to public betas acting as a vehicle to help build hype for your title, but I don't think that has to be completely exclusive from a beta being an important part of the final stages of development/preparation for release.

This game is set to come out this summer, hence it's a demo.  If this was 18 months ago when the game was still being built, I would consider it a beta, but when you are this close to release you are not going to completely change fundamental aspects of the gameplay based on user feedback.  Unless of course this game does get pushed back til 2012 because of this, then it could be seen as a Beta still.

" "beta" is now just a word for demo. Or thats what I think.  "

At first, I was rather annoyed with developers releasing "beta's" that were obviously just demo's, but I really can't blame them any more.  Whenever you see people playing proper beta's, they treat it as nothing more than a demo.  I've been in the new Age of Empires beta and the community on there is just hell, people just don't seem to understand that they point of it is to find what doesn't work and help fix it.  The Guild Wars 2 guys have already said there will definitely not be an open beta, and they'll just do a preview event close to the release.  A few bugs is less damaging than having millions judging an unfinished product.

I'm assuming (and hoping) that it would've been announced by now if the PSN outage effected Infamous 2's release date at all.

They just announced the official release date for Europe, so I guess there's no delays.