Well, getting out from the sandbox means that your site can be found for certain competitive keyword. It doesn't mean ranking high at all. Ranking depends on Google ranking also, while sandbox, I think, is completely different thing. One of my site was created in April, it received a good inbound link from our main pr6 site and was crawled almost instantly. That site has never been changed since then. For all 9 months it could be found in Google for some very rare keywords but not for it's main keywords. And suddenly it appeared on the second page of SERPs.