While Nominet won’t officially be launching “direct UK” until next year they’ve already started delegating some of the domains.
Apparently 69 names were requested by the UK government and the first of these were delegated recently:
Nominet has delegated the new second-level .uk domain names royal.uk, princeofwales.uk, supremecourt.uk and jcpc.uk to the Royal Household, the Household of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the Supreme Court, and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council respectively.
At the moment all of the domains are registered directly with Nominet and not via a Nominet registrar.
The whois output also does not reflect a “Registration status” though I suspect it will within the next 24 – 48 hours.
At the moment none of the newly delegated names appears to be resolving and my browser (Chrome) is trying to get me to visit their .gov.uk sites instead.
