Meh, taking my time with ESO. It's not a great game IMO, but I'm burned out on others and I'm in no rush. Wildstar is another one I'll slowly play through at some point, not great (going by the beta) but passable. The "next big MMO" for me has yet to appear. That game was almost "The Secret World" but for some reason it keeps hurting my hand to play it so I pretty much retired as a 10.2 wimp though I pop in occasionally.
The thing with ESO is that Bethesda's entire promise for selling the game is that they plan to do frequent content updates, and add new things in for the endgame every month (we're about to see if that's true very soon). Which means that they themselves are focused on the endgame.
What's more one of the annoying things about developing characters through the game is that very little matters until you hit level cap, since pretty much every piece of gear you find or obtain is something that your going to pass through fairly quickly. You don't actually get anything that's going to be with you for a while until the very end. This means that the rewards are inevitably unsatisfying. It all comes down to questing, and while ESO's quests aren't great, I've seen far worse, in 29 levels it's managed to keep me occupied in the time I put into it.
I am likely done with hardcore play after my WoW retirement (especially with growing tendonitis combined with some arthritis), but I'll admit that being able to whip through ESO's content if you want to is not a bad thing. See, when I was playing hardcore and lived for raids it was goof for the regulars in the guild to have a few different raid-capable alts so different people could fill different roles if they needed to. It's good that a guild can develop a backup healer alt or something like that fairly easily if the need arises. Recruiting new people isn't always an option when you already have a full raiding contingent and already have to worry about people perhaps getting left on the bench.
That said I'd also point out that leveling a character in "less than a week" is actually a pretty time consuming and says a lot for the game pace and content. Especially if this guide is written by someone who has played a lot of MMOs and really knows the tricks to power leveling. I've known people to be able to max a character in a couple of days (though gearing them for endgame is somewhat different, it might take a week all together if the guild schedules special runs specifically to gear the alt). I won't even get into easy games like say "Star Trek Online" where some people would probably be bloody scandalized at how fast you can hit top level if you want to and know what your doing.
That said inside of a couple of months almost all activity in any MMO is going to be based around the endgame. It's simply a reality. In "The Secret World" you wind up running your BB generating NM dungeons either with PUGs or your cabal of choice. In WoW you raid, etc... in most games PVP represents an alternative endgame activity.