Sorry to be disappointing OP, but it's really not that different from WoW... the grind is worse (the first 5 hours of play were ok, the next 15 were like pulling teeth, and I swear Coruscant was the WORST experience I've ever had in any mmo. Imagine the very bland and repetitive dungeons from Dragon Age 2 but without the interesting characters and sense of progression and story and the usual mmo-ish "kill x number of y"). And you have to do that with EVERY new character on the republic side.
The story and dialogues are meh, I stopped giving a crap and started skipping through the dialogues after the first 10 or so quests.
The character classes are really dull, and I found the gameplay for the ranged ones to be really really bad. The smuggler for example is like playing a Siege Tank in starcraft... go there, "deploy" (aka get in cover), use ability, kill enemy, get out of cover, move there, deploy, kill, move out of cover, deploy, and so on.
I did like the fact that, even while playing solo, the game focuses on fighting groups of enemies at a time. That manages to make combat *slightly* less boring.
I was really hoping for this game to be the "WoW-Killer".... but all I could think while playing TOR was "sigh, I was I could play WoW instead" for the entire 40+ hours I spent playing
And no, I will not be buying it.