Well I have dropped another alpha, and I have gotten the same issue submitted again.
"The payment module is missing!"
Well this is because the payment module has now been depreciated in favor of the new and much improved receipts system (ec_receipts). This has been a big set of changes that will allow us to create much better payment interfaces to which can take advantage of more than just the take money. Things like refunds and being able to pay affiliates directly, and also it opens up the functionality for recurring payments. And there has been a number of API improvements to a module to handle more than 1 payment gateway, so it is much nicer to implement a module.
There has also been a lot of added functionality which can be used to handle things like administering parts of the payment gateway to allow things like currency (proper multi-currency is coming), and being able to turn off features of a payment gateway. eg, you may not accept paypal as a payment method, but you may want to pay affiliates with paypal.
ATM there is only 1 payment gateway, PayPal. I have not converted any other modules to use the new receipts system, and even the COD module as I want to do some nice things like being able to create many COD style payment methods.
If you are testing, you can use the PayPal sandbox to do testing, and the new PayPal module has full support for this feature, and also it uses not only IPN (Instant Payment Notification) but also PDT (Payment Data Transfer) so you can test start to finish and PayPal will notify your system that they payment was successful while being behind a firewall.
If someone wants to convert the COD module to use the new receipts system please do. I will help me get things done quicker.