iOS 6 supports HTML5 video autoplay: intentional or not?

I confirmed that the inclusion of the "autoplay" attribute in an HTML5 video tag induces autoplay functionality on all devices sold at the Apple Store that have iOS 6 installed. However, on page 21 of the latest version that I could find at Apple's developer site of the Safari HTML5 Audio and Video Guide for developers it states that both loading of media data and playing said media cannot be automatically initiated by JavaScript code in Mobile Safari. Granted, this guide was released on July 23, but the developer preview of iOS 6 was out before then so I wonder if the rules laid out in the guide still apply to iOS 6.

Has anybody seen official documentation from Apple stating that this change was intentional? The company was quite adamant before about not allowing autoplay on mobile devices, and even thwarted every hack that the development community came up including the WebSockets bug. It would be weird that they suddenly do a 180 on this so I'm thinking this might be a bug.

I'm desperately trying to find information because one core aspect of the design of my company's custom HTML5 video playing solution was predicated on there not being the ability to autoplay on mobile devices, and if ad management code can now start playing pre-roll ads automatically that will cause some serious issues in the ability of our player to keep track of state.

Thank you in advance for any help.