It's amazing for me how the LN nodes are growin on the mainnet, a few weeks before it was just really a few and now there are nearly 300 nodes. And they are only testing, because there's just a few real merchants who accept the payments via the LN network yet, so most of the guys who run the LN hubs are only testing the micro payments via sending the coins to each other? The lucky thing is that despite of they're testing on the main net, the fee of the channel opening and closing transactions (they have to go thru the normal blockchain) are really low now, compared to the end of last year.
There's a thread where someone have posted a link where the LN network is visualized, but I was not brave enough to click the link, so I don't know if it's safe and really works or not :
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/2838979.0

Does anyone have a link to a 'timeline' on when they expect this aspect to go LIVE in a real sense and not a 'test' sense? and/or a link to such speculations?

knowing Bitcoin Core...they could test this till August 2018..they have the coding speed of a Snail.....

anyway, anybody, anything?

Ain't got a clue. And there is no 'they'. It's hundreds or thousands of people from all over the world all beavering away.

I presume what most people will regard as the 'real' launch will be the big exchanges offering it. As stated elsewhere I don't think they will.

I don't think exchanges offering LN transfers will happen anytime soon, also it isn't some I would expect LN to be used for. Main purpose of LN is for micro transactions, so essentially as a payment processor where bitcoin is accepted as payment would be the first places where I would like to see LN.
And anyways I don't think exchanges will allow trading of BTC which aren't transacted on the chain.

believe it or not a lot of people are interested in the technology itself and want to get involved with it as soon as possible so they start running a Lightning node and have fun with it. you don't have to do it with a very large amount of bitcoin. you can put a smaller amount in and test things. and you may even earn some satoshis as the fees!