When I special ordered mine, my dealer told me straight out that special order would be the better route as a 350 RWD here in the Eastern region will be extremely hard to come by as all cars shipped into the region from Lexus are AWD and there may be an occasional 350 RWD that pops up but it may not be the color or optioned the way you want. Although your option configuration may be a fairly common package, it is the RWD that pushes it out of the norm.
Your dealer is obviously waiting for one to come through the normal allocation process which could actually take longer than a special order to come. They are probably checking the monthly production report from Lexus to see if one has been produced for the region with your configuration as well. They do not know anything more than that as far as information for cars available so I do not think that they are purposely misleading you.
I have been two months into my special order and my dealer cannot tell me anything yet as Lexus has not informed them and they hound their Lexus rep for information on a weekly basis.
I have posted this before but here is what a monthly production report looks like. A 9506 is a 250 AWD and a 9516 is a 350 AWD. BM is blind spot monitor, FJ is F-sport, FL is luxury package, NV is nav without Mark Levinson.

 

Thanks a lot for the info. I called my sales rep earlier, and he doesn't have any update on my car yet. He said "no news from japan as yet, and we are waiting for production and shipping dates."

I don't feel so good about this. Part of my negotiation was based on the time of delivery. If Bay Ridge Lexus doesn't have anything for me by mid August, I will go cancel the order. In the mean time, I'm even thinking about reaching out to other dealers in the tri-state area to see what they have in the lot.

 

I've been looking through dealer inventories on the east coast. In the northeast are, majority of cars seem to be awd. No ML. Southeast has mostly RWD with ML. I'm not sure if I want to go with RWD. I live in NYC and our weather can get pretty brutal. My last two RWD cars (G35coupe and 335iconv) were pretty dangerous to drive in the winter.