What have I missed? Installed, licensed and launched 25.1. Even rebooted the laptop. The beta fails to launch with the message that 2025 R1 must be installed and run at least once.
Got this feeling that it is something stupid. 
Doug
Got this feeling that it is something stupid
Yeah, except it was me who did something stupid. The beta is looking for the wrong version number of 2025.1. But since 2025.1 and 2024.2 were basically the same version (main difference was that 2025.1 accepts a mac and windows license), we still also had the check for 2024.2 in there.
If you install/run 2024.2 at least once, you'll be good to go. Sorry for the confusion.