Tipped off by the Petopia blog I tested Scare Beast. And despite the new tooltip it is not instant cast. Still 1.5s cast time, but the range has indeed increased to 30 yards.
I hope the deployed code is indeed the intended behaviour and they just forgot to update the tooltip. I'm all for giving Hunters a bit more love in PvP, but an instant cast fear against druids was just too much. 1.5s is still pretty fast; unless you have the hunter targeted, see the cast bar, and shift out of feral form you're still going to get feared. But now you have a hope of avoiding it.
The patch.txt says instant cast, btw, but the online patch notes don't. I'm guessing they made a last minute change to take out the instant cast. (Update): Mania has the scoop from the forums; was a last minute change out of pity for us poor druids.