Words do sometimes mean what they mean. Projects have phases. Designs have generations. A generation produced by a phase of a product may have multiple distinct products based on that design.
So the design team (and any members of the community making development contributions that they adopt are presently in phase 1. The purpose of phase 1 is to design, produce and deliver the Generation 1 design, once dubbed the "Command X16p". That is the "through hole, new production ASIC IC" based design, where that description is "to the extent practicable" ... there is an FM chip that is widely available as good quality parts, so that is used over the alternatives of an FPGA core or not having an FM sound chip at all, there is no through hole, in production hardware sprite and tile VGA video chip available, so the project team went with a video chip "in the spirit of" an 80s era, like a mash-up of the two video chips in a Commodore 128 which was then upgraded. But the 8-bit CPU, 8-bit MCU, VIA, SRAM, Flash ROM, and glue logic are all through hole, new in production ASIC ICs.
If this is successful enough to warrant putting out a cost-reduced version of the Gen I board, then the design, production and delivery of the cost-reduced Gen II board, based on surface mount components where available (the CPU, MCU, VIA, SRAM, FlashROM all are, the YM2151 is not) would be the second phase of the project.
If everything goes well to that point, then making an "as FPGA as possible" -- either a pair of FPGA's of the type used for Vera or a single FPGA that has enough logic and pin resource to add 6502, VIA, YM2151, etc. cores to the Vera design -- plus perhaps 512KB SRAM and FlashROM -- that would be the Gen 3 board and designing, producing and delivering it would be Phase 3 of the project.
The extent to which the boards will be available in a product that includes a case option is up in the air. The design team obviously knows there is some interest in that from some parts of both the Gen 1 and Gen 2 target markets. The original Gen 1 case was not financially workable for production volume reasons, but it seems they may be sorting out an alternative which will work better at the scale of demand for a Gen 1 system with dedicated case. I think it looks cool, but on the other hand I am (hopefully) part of the target audience for the Gen 2 design, since Gen 1 will definitely be out of my price range.
So if the first priority is the case, then the second priority is "real chips", whether or not the subject of the OP is true cannot really be considered decided at this point in time, though for Gen 1 it sounds like the answer will be sorted out sometime this year.
Edit: As discussed in the Official Announcements forum, the design concept for the Gen2 is heading in the direction of looking like a game console, with the single slot being "the cartridge port". That would make the "cost reduced" version also the version that is sold as a complete ready to go unit. Note that that would still be compatible with a 2 or 4 card riser card, but since it would stick out of the box, it would be more like a "multi-cart adapter box" than just a "riser card".