Because they are well-tested and made relatively infrequently, formal releases are useful for people who don't want to be on the "bleeding edge" of development, or who just want to run applications. Since formal releases are effectively unchanging (there are typically very few official patches made to them), they are relatively easy to support, both by NetBSD's developers and the developers of applications. The biggest problem with running the latest formal release of NetBSD is that you don't have access to the latest features and bug fixes in the development tree.
Formal releases are relatively easy to install. All of the platforms supported by a formal release come with a detailed set of installation instructions, and most also include some sort of bootstrapping media. (For example, the i386 and Amiga ports typically use floppy disk images to bootstrap, while the hp300 port uses a miniroot filesystem image.) There is also typically an upgrade procedure to bring a system from the previous formal release to the current one.
In short, if you're not the type of person who'd be willing to upgrade your operating system on a semi-daily basis, or if you want a system that is relatively easy to install and upgrade, a formal release of NetBSD is for you.
NetBSD 0.8, released
on April 20, 1993
NetBSD 0.9, released
on August 23, 1993
NetBSD 1.0, released
on October 26, 1994
NetBSD 1.1, released
on November 26, 1995
NetBSD 1.2, released
on October 4, 1996
We do not yet have a date planned for the next formal release; we will ship no software before its time.
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