You can tell it's a prototype from the excess wiring.
The header to the front left of the board is for attaching a cable to upload sketches to something like a Bare Bones Freeduino without requiring the FTDI USB cable. (More details on that in my recent post in the hardware forums.)
The shield celebrated its successful birth by logging onto the Arduino IRC channel and responding to messages directed to it.
It's essentially on a permanent hiatus due to the existence of the official Arduino Ethernet shield and a couple of other shields using the WizNet modules.
I'm still exploring the software side of things, you can check out my Flashduino page for that.