The PC launch of Rage was met by a lot of disappointments, mainly due to the technical problems on Radeon graphics. Bethesda should really think like Valve on this one.
Team Fortress 2, the popular PC shooter by Valve, has survived since 2007 thanks to Steam and its effective wallet raiding. Basically, a good Valve move would be to release a lot of content related to RAGE simultaneously.
Example: Rage demo launch, weekend deal, x64 executable, new DLC, HD textures, TF2 promos, etc.
Oh, and a huge Bethesda logo on the banner would help a lot. After all, Skyrim is currently the most played game on Steam.

Where's the promised x64 build anyway?

Last word was that the x64 build (and tools) was waiting for an AMD release driver to stabilize. Currently all we have are interim "performance drivers", but obviously they want a full release driver to test against and make sure that everything is cool before proceeding.

I think that two things happened here.

First is the obvious AMD technical problems. That one goes twofold: they really should have been foreseen and appropriate measures to counter them taken, and AMD really should have had drivers that worked.

Second one is the hate campaign against Rage. You only have to look at certain recesses of the internet (after moms, us) to find plenty of evidence of this. It's still ongoing, and Rage's name is unfortunately mud. One can only speculate. Hopefully time (and a new target for the haters) will resolve that, but it's not time yet.

No doubt it would be best to wait until after Christmas.

First of all, RAGE for PC needs patches. I bought the game yesterday. I played a bit and it's a trainwreck from a technical standpoint.