Ok, played for a few hours. My first impressions are pretty good. I think they're still working on AI a bit, but FE is already more polished than Elemental was at launch (and probably at patch 1.1) and I'm playing 0.77. Apparently 0.80 is a bunch of AI work. One thing to note is that they've said there's no multiplayer and no intention of adding it until maybe an expansion. It has to do with the way they did the tactical battle apparently, I dunno. Check out the forums for more on that.
It seems like it's a little light on content, but, again, better than Elemental was. There's still an issue of delays when you click on things, both on the world map and in battles, but it's not enough to stop me from playing for three hours like I did. Battles themselves feel really good. At first I was a bit disappointed that my mage only had slow and counterspell and one other thing until I realized turn order was determined on a per unit basis (Final Fantasy Tactics style) so slowing down an enemy could give my other units multiple turns per enemy unit turn. After a few level up bonuses and one spell I managed to completely eliminate in-battle spell costs, but that might be a bug, I'm not sure (stacking two 25% reductions and a 50% reduction gave me 100% instead of ~28% like I kind of expected). Champion leveling is fun because instead of just distributing stat points you pick one of 5 random-ish bonuses, some rarer and better than others, ranging from common vanilla stat boosts (+3 to a stat), uncommon combination stat boosts (+1 to dex, +3 to initiative), common magic tiers (unlocks new spells), and random other things (increase gold income, decrease cost of casting spells) and I THINK the first level you has you choose a path for the hero to guide what bonuses they get.
I think there was something weird with the map I started with (I started almost completely blocked in by mountains and with only a little fertile ground, which is now required for founding cities) so I'll probably try fiddling with options and see what happens.