I played the beta as well, so I thought I'd chime in with my thoughts. I really liked playing through the class story line. Play the same class and go down a different advanced class tree and you'll be replaying the same quests minus the AC line which is what - 10% of the quests? Even playing a different class altogether will only be somewhat different until you get out of the starting area. It will keep the story whores entertained for 6 months or so, until they've seen the story unfold from a couple different perspectives. After that, the story is done and it will have to live or die as a standard mmo.
The combat is identical to WoW sans autoattack, so anyone looking for something different is not gonna find it in combat. The graphics are acceptable, a tad better than WoW, nowhere near the quality of Rift. If you're a graphics whore, you won't like TOR.
My biggest beef, though, is the emptyness of the world and the linearity of the game. I walked through Drommund Kaas and it's empty. There are a handful of npcs standing around, but unless they're there to hand out a quest, they just stand there mutely. They never move a pixel. They should be vibrant, pathing about and speaking. In WoW, merely clicking on an npc at least gets you a vocal response. It's odd that a game where the major selling point is the voice acting neglected to voice anything outside the cutscenes.
The story is very linear. Go here, do this, then that, kill 10 pigs while you're there. Return. Go somewhere else, repeat. You are led from one linear quest zone to the next. No choice in the matter at all. Why can't I go to another zone? Sure, I might get my ass handed to me, but that should be my choice. Hell, I ran a level 20 something all over Outland in WoW doing the Midsummer Fire quests. It wasn't easy, I died MANY times, but I did it. In TOR, I can't even see another zone until I finish with the prior one.
That said, I really enjoyed playing through the story lines. The one Flashpoint I did was AMAZING. I didn't like losing the roll to talk so that the ending came out different than I would have chosen, though. I think TOR will ultimately be a (very hot) flash in the pan. It will be great for 6 months or a year then slowly trickle off as people return to WoW or whatever mmo they were playing before. It's sad, really. This game had such promise. And it's not like it shipped with a bad engine, it shipped with a ton of tiny little cosmetical failures. But these add up to being a pain. It's like buying a new Corvette that runs great, handles well, and is comfortable enough to sleep in, yet the left blinker doesn't work, the lights won't dim, the horn doesn't work, the power window on the passengers side will only roll down, the radio plays only static, etc. It will still get you where you're going and looks great, but it will annoy the piss out of you during the drive. A lot of the flaws can be patched in, and I hope they do so, but some of it will require too much effort and cost. They are not gonna hire voice actors just to voice a couple lines for npc vendors and peasants.
I preordered, and I don't regret it. I'll play it for a few months, but I fear I'll be back to Rift in no time. And Rift's voice acting is so horrible, I'd RATHER there be none. I wish some company would take a risk and not copy WoW. A WoW clone with a couple new things is never going to dethrone WoW. Why would I leave a game I like to play the same game reskinned and start over with a new guild, leaving all the friends I've made behind? It will take a different experience altogether to make me want to do that. I'm playing Rift now, and I think it's superior to WoW in almost all aspects (voice acting, story writing blows), but I'm sure I'll return to WoW at some point just to hang out with my friends.
Tl;dr - SWTOR is worth playing, but has little end game appeal, and too WoW-like to leave WOW for longterm.
