I finished playing the tutorial through twice. I noticed a lot of the complaints that were mentioned already, such as voice acting, but I feel the RPS article is spot-on.
First of all, they should have just made the entire first tutorial an intro movie, because it felt more like that than an actual game. If you're still waiting to download it, keep this one fact in mind - that first one is a tutorial mission, not a demo; you can only do the actions you are told to do. I actually missed the ability to rotate the map, on my first play through, because they disable & hide things until they point them out to you. The second mission starts the same way, but only forces you to take a few actions before it lets you make all the decisions.
Firaxis committed what I view as one of the single greatest sins in modern game development - no frigging keybinding configuration! Yes, you are forced to use WASD/arrows/mouse side scrolling to move around the map, and Q & E to rotate it. The ONLY input device config option is to choose between mouse or gamepad.
(Yes, I mouse left-handed, and I HATE WASD!) Hopefully, like with Skyrim, keybinds can be tweaked by editing game files.
While the movement option versus the originals Time Units is a simpler option, I think I like the cover mechanism, and the various soldier abilities. I hope the actual voice acting is better in the full game, but the American accents on the initial squad (which included Japanese & Russian soldiers) was bad. I also wish you could have at least explored the base a little bit, instead of only going to a place when the demo directs you there, so we could have seen a little bit more.
I also did not like the continual "click to use ability, click again to confirm choice", but I didn't look too hard in the options to see if that could be disabled.
Overall, I think if the demo was my only exposure, I'd wait until it slipped down to a $10 Steam sale event price. But really replaying the 2nd mission, and watching the OXM series, I'm going to get it. I'll probably even pre-order, because I actually took vacation for the 9th through the 12th, a while before I even realized what the release date was going to be. Firaxis really messed up, I think - the demo should just have been a couple (or one each) of random small, medium or large maps, and let us flounder through. And, you know, had the option to look at a keybinding list, to see what we could do and set them as we wanted.