Nonetheless, o, the hype! Some caveats:
1. 100 vehicles is not "production."
2. "Please ... drive safely while paying constant attention to your surroundings." is not Level 3 Automation. The point of Level 3 automation is explicitly that it should allow the driver to not pay attention to their surroundings under limited circumstances, while the vehicle fully does the driving. The human remains the fallback mode: they must stay awake and alert so that they can take over control if the vehicle requests it. However they are NOT required to maintain a constant supervisory function. If they are, then that's Level 2 automation.
The problem with Level 3 has always been that it requires the vendor to take liability for unsupervised autonomous driving (like levels 4 and 5), but only some of the time, and the driver to take liability the rest of the time. The handover from one to the other is fraught, with the humans almost certainly being the weak link, since they're not all THAT good at staying alert in the first place, and get much much worse when they don't have supervisory duties to keep them awake. For this reason, many vendors have (wisely, IMHO) chosen to skip Level 3 automation entirely.
So my synopsis of this would be:
1. Honda's engineers have come up with some genuinely interesting new capabilities for autonomous driving, albeit falling well short of what would be needed for full Level 5 autonomy.
2. Honda's management would like to convert those innovations into some good PR for the company.
3. Honda's lawyers, actuaries, and human-factors people have realised that there's no way in hell mass deployment of Level 3 automation is a good idea, and so to limit the potential damage, are only allowing 100 vehicles to be shipped, to pre-qualified and well-trained buyers, and then furthermore attaching disclaimers which knock this down to L2.
4. L5 Autonomy remains a long ways away.