System Center 2012 SQL Collation Error

Recently several sys admins have asked me for help with an upgrade to System Center Configuration Manager 2012.
Firstly, although it may seem as though System Center 2012 was designed to be hosted on Windows Server 2012 and with SQL Server 2012 as the backend, this is not the case.
For that you'll need to wait for System Center 2012 Service Pack 1. Grab the beta from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/sp1-default.aspx.

System Center 2012

To run SCCM 2012 in a production environment today, Windows Server 2008 R2 is an ideal host with SQL Server 2008 R2, Service Pack 1 and Cumulative update 4 for backend.
Iv'e had no issues with this setup in the past.

The second issue people run into is SQL server Collation, SCCM may fail the installation check with the message:

"Installation check of SCCM 2012 fails with: Configuration Manager requires that you configure your SQL Server instance and Configuration Manager site database (if already present) to use the SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS collation, unless you are using a Chinese operating system and require GB18030 support"

This can happen not only on production SQL servers with several active databases but on clean installations as well as I have verified.
To change the SQL instance collation, open an elevated command prompt and execute the following command assuming default DB instance name and current logged on user is authoritative:

setup.exe /ACTION=REBUILDDATABASE /SQLCOLLATION=SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS /INSTANCENAME=MSSQLSERVER /SQLSYSADMINACCOUNTS=%username%

Then re-run the SCCM 2012 installation check, it should pass the above issue and allow continuation of the installation.