Recently while doing an installation of SharePoint 2010 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 server with a SQL Server 2012 back end I ran into a small roadblock. The following error popped up as I was running the product configuration wizard.
After a little searching I found out that the installation media that was downloaded for us was SharePoint 2010, not SharePoint 2010 SP1. In order to do the installation with a SQL 2012 database server you must be using SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1. After downloading and installing the service pack on the server everything went smoothly.
There are details in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2460045