I noticed in the review it states that when you blow things up, nothing gets left behind, no shell, no nothing. That's with the 360 version, as indicated by the footnote of the article. That seems kind of weird, I was playing the PC demo last week and I could swear I saw things blow up when you machine gunned them, and shells of planes fall as I shot them down. It's probably a discrepancy between the settings used on the 360 and the settings I used on my PC, still, odd nonetheless as I wouldn't have thought that would be very resource intensive, it seems like a strange thing to leave out.
That said, I quite liked it. I'm not really a fan of flight simulators (I dislike learning curves), but I love the 'feeling' of arcade style flight combat games (I loved Lylat Wars, although that was on-rails and released donkey's years ago). I really liked the HAWX demo, for whatever reason, but the three planes in the demo, like you said in your full review for the 360, did handle exactly alike. Still, I liked it, and am getting it for the PC tomorrow. The demo was much more fun with a flight stick than the keyboard, though. No idea how it plays like on a pad.
I'll probably end up playing it a bit and getting bored of it, but whatever.