The Release Name Beefy Miracle was originally proposed for Fedora 16 [1], but it didn’t make it in the end, instead, Verne was chosen [2].
But the name Beefy Miracle got proposed again for Fedora 17 and this time it made it [3].
The fans of the name even started http://beefymiracle.org/ to promote the name for this Fedora release.
 
Beefy Miracle is the official release name for Fedora 17.

[1] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/about/relnamef16
[2] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2011-April/002948.html
[3] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2011-October/003002.html

The first (and only) alpha version of Fedora 16 was just released.
The release happened one week later than planned and thus the whole schedule was moved back by one week.

The Alpha version of Fedora 16 contains almost all major changes to the distribution.
Before the release, the Kernel will be upgraded from 3.0 to 3.1.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel.announce/765

Today, a posting on the Fedora mailing list announced that BTRFS will not be the default filesystem in Fedora 16. 
When the development of Fedora 16 started, the team announced that they would use the innovative BTRFS filesystem as default choice. 
thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/152285 

At the time, that was heavily discussed in the community because the next generation Linux filesystem still has many problems. 
One of the is, that there are still no tools available to check the integrity of the filesystem. 
But the availability of such a tool at the time of the first Alpah release was a requirement for BTRFS to become default in Fedora 16. 

Originally scheduled for May already, a tool for that should appear very soon. 
With that in mind, it’s very probably that BTRFS will be the default filesystem in Fedora 17. 

In both, Ubuntu and Fedora, BTRFS can be chosen as filesystem manually.

Already during the development of the Linux 3.0 kernel it became clear that some applications didn’t like the new numbering scheme or event the new number at all and would need changes to work properly with newer Kernel versions.

While these problems might be solved in up-to-date or up-coming versions of the applications and thus not make problems for new distributions, these are still present in the application versions used in most current distributions.
Because of these problems, the Fedora team has decided to rename Linux 3.0 to 2.6.40 for Fedora 15.

In their up-coming release Fedora 16 however, they will use the Kernel version 3.0.

https://plus.google.com/106327083461132854143/posts/SbnL3KaVRtM

Next Tuesday will be feature freeze for Fedora 16 and so the feature list is likely to be fairly complete at this stage.

It contains many things that are very obvious like may updated applications, like Gnome 3.2 or porting more SysV-init scripts over to SystemD.
But there are more interesting plans, like removing Hal (hardware abstraction Layer) or switching to Grub2 for the default choice of bootloader. Interestingly, Ubuntu has done both of these tasks already in past releases.

In the Fedora project, this list is not absolutely mandatory. If things turn out to work really bad, they can be removed. An example for this is Systemd, that was already planned for Fedora 14, but got removed before the release.
One of the features that could be removed before the release of version 16 is the choice for BTRFS as default file-system. This feature has been heavily discussed in the community and the feature list says 0% done.

 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/FeatureList