Seeing as HTC released a statement, which is included at the end of the article, it is definitely real.
The question is, how much stock does Sprint already have? Will they use stock from online pre-orders to stock the stores so that customers are not turned away at the store and instead just delay us via email? Or will they ship us our pre-orders and have very few devices in store (like the OG Evo had like 5 per store). Or do they have no stock at all and the people that already got tracking are trolling/confused by another UPS shipment they have coming? We have heard from sprint multiple times shipping will begin at 11pm CST, I guess we'll know the answer in 3 hours....