Currently it apparently is the plan to release Housing Keeps at the START or persistence instead of the end of beta. Would you rather they push back persistent a little bit to make sure we can test these features and find major bugs BEFORE it's the start of persistent and it matters, or would you rather they go into persistent with an untested territorial control system?
The problem is that I do not think it will be tested if it is placed into Beta. Not thoroughly anyway. It takes so much time/material/organization to build a keep and infrastructure that I do not think it will be done in Beta the same way it would be in game. The issues that the TC system had in MO1 did not become apparent for many many months after the system was released.
Now they could find ways to test different small parts of the system by organizing people to help with specific things, but they aren't that organized and players often have agenda different than SV's. This would however let them test for technical problems. The biggest issues with the TC system in MO1 were not technical ones at all. They were deep balance/game design problems which will probably not come to light in a Beta test. People are not playing the Beta in the same way that the live game gets played. SV should have a lot of data about this system from MO1, hopefully they can interpret it correctly and act on it wisely.
I suspect that SV needs a year or more to build the TC system and plans to implement it step by step over a lot of time. The keeps that they have in game at persistence will be rudimentary and not the final version. Designed only to fill the need of being a home for groups who can't live in a town. If we are lucky they can fuel some political action, but I wouldn't be surprised if at first they can't even be destroyed.
Edit: added
Believe it or not, TC is not a necessary part of the game. MO1 had many fun times before full TC. A lot of players would say that it was more fun before TC. (Population numbers over time would reflect this as well, I expect.)