[smew]

I'm just 1 hr into the alpha test, so I haven't tested this out yet very thoroughly. I do remember, though, that the similar functionality in kGTD had this problem: If in System Preferences, under International -> Format, I changed the region to something other than US (specifically Romanian, haven't tested others), the smart date recognition stopped working.

I changed it back to US, becuase iCal has some issues with showing the weekday name in that situation as well, but maybe you'll want to keep this in mind.