Just a couple of things that have been on my mind. Somewhere, in the plethora of media we've recently been handed there was mention of combat controls working like this; right button(or trigger) attacks with right hand, left button (or trigger) attacks with left hand, pull both at the same time to block. There was mention that blocking is now something that has to be timed, you can't just hold them down and block forever. So, what I'm saying here is that Skyrim's basic melee combat system sounds almost identical to Condemned: Criminal Origins. If it indeed works as described you could potentially give that a go to get a feel for it. I was always quite satisfied with it, hope it works out well for Skyrim.

The other thing I'd like to talk about is PC quick access methods for items. In Oblivion we had hotkeys and I'm curious what people would think of using directional/circle menus. After playing Crysis I was impressed with how well they actually worked on the PC, I'm sure there are many other examples, some of which I've likely played, but that's the one that sticks out to me. The system I'm thinking of would essentially retain all the hotkeys from Oblivion (to assign stuff from our 'favorites' list) but holding any one of them would pop up a 4-6 slot circle menu for even more items. Tapping the key would simply equip whatever is in slot 1 in that menu. Whether the game pauses or not I don't really care, but I bring this up because I've been playing through Oblivion as a mage and have been discovering that while hotkeys do provide quick access to, what, 8 spells, most of them are on the other half of the keyboard and awkward to access, thus I tend to only use those spells in slots 1-5, and 4 and 5 only rarely (and not because the others are useless spells). Plus, this would add quick access to some 32 or more items and allow the player to organize them by whatever categories they please.