A quick walk-through of the character creation screen, looking at each race, seeing a few changes to facial features to get an idea on how that works, that would be nice.
We've seen enough combat for now, frankly. I don't think there's anything really exciting to be had there. Guess what? You hit things with weapons and then they die. I want to know more about the world, the little things. I want them to walk into a room and pick up some items. I want definitive proof that Oblivion's economic strangling has not been applied, where every non-scaling item is invariably worth <= 50 gold (novice alembics for everyone!.) I want the character to have a conversation with an NPC. (You can still talk to NPCs, right? They haven't removed that? Speechcraft is gone, so I don't know anymore. I suppose it's too much to hope that non-combat quests will exist.)
You live in a cave, bro? You need to chillax. NPC convos will be better than ever. Read the articles on the Beth Blog, man.
There have always been and always will be non-combat quests, btw.....and I'm hoping you were just being pessimistically sarcastic when you said all that in the parentheses....