Hello,
good news, everyone! I've just put Etherpad into production, to be used by the wider community! The service is available at
http://pad.documentfoundation.org
In order to fight spam, pad creation has to be manually requested at the moment. Everyone can edit existing pads, but not create new ones. Be advised that all pads are listed on the index page, and are publicly accessible - editing of confidential information should happen elsewhere.
To request creation of a new pad, please write to hostmaster@documentfoundation.org
Data you put into the pad from now on will be preserved in our MySQL database, so it's now officially in production mode. We still need to gather some experience, but I think we're good to go to use it. 
I propose to use the respective project's/mailing list names for the pads, like "qa", "marketing", "website", and prefix it with the language code where needed, like "de_marketing" or "it_qa".
Enjoy, and thanks a lot to Robinson for the initial kick-off of this!
Florian