I am thinking of buying my first gaming PC, will this spec be likely to be able to run Skyrim on max?

Intel Core i7-2600 3.46 Ghz
ASUS P8P67 (NEW REV 3.0) (I think this removes the problems with the Intel chipsets.)
8GB DDR3 RAM
1536MB Nvidia GeForce GTX 580
120GB Intel SSD
2TB Hard Drive
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

You're right actually, I checked amazon.ca and found that the 6870 was about $50 cheaper, I just figured to the older one would be cheaper by now. I guess that doesn't apply to GPUs :shrug:

This probably isn't actually true. WoW doesn't have physics like Skyrim will, nor does wow have all the little movable objects all over the place that obey the game physics either. It's completely possible that Skyrim will have more going on than WoW in any location. On top of that the textures and lighting will very likely be considerably heavier in Skyrim. Cataclysm improved on that a bit in WoW, but their rendering engine simply won't be able to do what Skyrim's will.

For example, shooting 20 arrows in WoW adds nothing to the environment for the client to render or apply physics to or really care about at all beyond the spell animation. In Skyrim (like Oblivion) shooting 20 arrows adds 20 new objects to to the environment that need to be rendered, check for collisions against, and apply physics to as needed.

TES games are a completely different beast from WoW. Items are handled so incredibly differently that they're not even really comparable. Everything (other than mobs) in WoW is static, in modern TES games a whole lot of stuff is dynamic. Personally, I can't wait until even more is dynamic... Fire that spreads, wrecking houses, all doors, chairs, furniture etc etc. The more dynamic stuff in the game the more real it becomes feels.