NFC is the whole thing behind "TOH" concept.
Jolla 1 has a funcitonnal NFC antenna.
The thing is, it's currently not used for anything else beside identifying other halfs (and most importantly it's not available to android).
- So getting it to work as before wouldn't be much complicated
- Getting it to work perfectly as users would like THAT is going to take time, and specially ressource from Myriad in order to make sure that NFC is available to all the wireless payment android apps, etc.


Keyboard currently already works on Jolla1, both purely hardware (TOHKDB) and bluetooth (A 4-parts foldable (= the W shaped one) "Stowaway" bluetooth keyboard is my daily driver, whenever I'm sitting at a desk with enough room). And they both "just work".
Android App support keyboard nicely too.
- So getting basic keyboard working would be about correctly licensing the patch already floating for Jolla 1.
- Getting it to work perfectly boils down to small nitpicking about details

IR is the only odd thing. And even there, IR is usually showing as a simple serial port with a few specific ioctl.
- So getting it to work basically just like the FM radio on some community ports (have the port available in /dev/, maybe write a simple app to emit codes on the IR - like a remote control emulator). Won't take ages.
- What would take ages is implementing ton of protocols over IR (file exchange, etc.) but I don't know if those things are still relevant in 2017 (seriously, are they ?)

In other words, Jolla could rather quickly cobble together something that more or less works (see the speed of community ports as a rough idea), and could then spent the next 6 months shipping out *upgrades* to make everything work better (see firmware upgrades nowaday on Jolla Phone 1 as a reference).

In short :
- if you "just" want to have a Sailfish OS smartphone and don't mind spending some time on openrepos.net to get all the patches to customize : Chen's smartphone could have SFOS available rather fast.
- if you want a perfectly-working hassle-free experience on par with Samsung Phone (including payments over NFC), you'll have to wait longer, until Jolla and Myriad irons everything out. In the meantime, you should perhaps consider using Android on this phone.

I was under the impression that chelien tries to short-cut some of the time by partly re-using available designs (specially regarding the main PCB).

I'm not saying that the phone is going to be available by next week,
but that it might not take as much time as a complete "ground-up" solution (like Openmoko, etc.)