I've been playing a bit on the beta, and my gf's been playing a lot and I figured I'd share some of our findings with all of you.

Death Knights are cool and they've done something really fantastic with the death knight starting area.  They've taken the game mechanism of "being in a different phase" (like the collecting the mana cells daily) and made it triggered on quest completion.  What this means is that the death knight starting area is seemlessly dynamic as you complete various quests.  This also means that we can't go on a death knight purging event in EPL since all the noob knights will be phased from us.  The death knight quests will take you to level 58 before you are done with them.  You will need to do them all since you start with zero talent points and completing the starting area quests give you additional talent points.  Death knights start with green gear and get each and every piece replaced with blue gear as they go through the starting quests.  I recommend speccing to get the ghoul pet, it makes levelling easier.   The place to purge death knights is going to be Hellfire Peninsula :-)

Inscription is undergoing a lot of changes and right now levelling it is completely unbalanced regarding the herbs you need.  Mageroyal will get you all the way to 400 skill for instance.  It's selling for 30-50G apiece (not a stack) in the beta AH.  So far there are only major inscriptions available (no minor ones), and I'm not even sure they are all working even though you can apply them to your spell book.  You'll need about 15-20 stacks of low (0-30), mid (30-60), high (60-70) and wotlk (70-80) zone herbs to completely level it.

I tried turning my imp into a killing machine and I think it was entirely broken.  I put 3 points in imp imp (30% extra dmg), added an imp damage glyph (more damage) and specced into imp firebolt and extra imp damage in the destruction tree.  None of it seemed to make any difference in his damage, so I assume most of it is broken.

Speccing into metamorphosis in the demonology tree was cool, but not worth it.  You get to turn into Illidan in essence and you get some new abilities as a demon, but it only lasts 40 seconds and the benefits aren't good enough to make a big difference in battle.  It might have some pvp advantages, but in general it's disappointing.

I really like the new Chaos Bolt at the top of the destruction tree.  It's a quick to cast spell, so it's going to be really useful.  I haven't tried an affliction spec yet, that's next.

The quests are pretty standard unfortunately.  I was hoping for some
unique ones like the death knights have, but I haven't encountered any. Quest rewards are nice green quality items in general.  The gear is a steady progression from Outland gear.  If you're in greens and blues you'll replace pieces quickly, but the epic gear will be good for a long time.

From what I've seen, there's no way in hell they are going to be ready to release in November.  The Northrend server crashes every 10-20 minutes,  the talent trees are still being tweaked, inscription isn't completed yet, the lag can be so bad you get about a frame every 2 seconds and I think the instances haven't been explored very much.  Plus there are a ton of bugs in quests and in general.  We'll see I guess :-)  Hope this doesn't affect the bets that have already been placed.