Wow. I'm not a fan of remakes. X-Com-likes have always fucked up or were just different games in the same genre. I've always wanted to see a true remake, it's the only way to bring it back. And Firaxis is probably the best company for this kind of thing. They do strategy games well, and they do remakes well. While Civ 5 was dumbed down, it was a really great game graphically, and I'm more than happy to pay just for similar quality art and graphics merged with gameplay like X-Com.
I've always wanted to win the X-Com games (without cheating) but it's just too much of a time sink. It's become one of those 'unplayable' games by today's standards, the interface was just too clunky, and I'll be damned if you want me to open every door in that ship for that one last alien. I know that's TFTD, but both had that annoying thing where you'd send your marines to crawl to the other side of the screen, only to see them get one-hit-killed.
I was also working on a turn based strategy game the other day, and I'm starting to think games like X-Com and Jagged Alliance were turn based partly because having real time shots all over the place would place too much computing stress on hardware of that time. I
My only wish for this is to keep the same gameplay. Don't add anything fancy, except maybe real-time combat. Maybe beef up the AI a bit, small bits like making equipping people more user friendly, and not having such sadistic level design. I think part of the creepy atmosphere of X-Com was that you would walk around for 5 mins and then get surprised by a barrage of fire, but there's got to be a less annoying way of doing that. Maybe, just maybe have things like buildings collapsing from fire, rather than being able to blow a building to bits and still not have it collapse (though the X-Com guys fixed that in Apocalypse).
Maybe Civ5 hurts everyone's expectations on gameplay, but they can't possibly mess it up if they keep the gameplay very similar.