Im curious, is the damage of your weapon (ie one handed) solely down to whether you have upgrade it with perks?

Say I make a new game and dont take any perks whatsoever... and get to level 20 using only one handed swords and my one handed went from 15 to 40 in that time. If I havent put any perks into one handed will the damage I do still only do as much as when I first started the game?

Or is uprgrading weapons skill with perks the only way to make that weapon more powerful? (ignoring enchanting etc..)

yes. perks are it. and smithing and enchanting. Personally, I like this system.

People will soon notice that "level" has pretty much lost it's conventional meaning... it really is a negative in this game. You gain nothing for being a higher level other than the skills that went into creating that level. It would be interesting to see how low a level a character could be completing the main quest. My bet is it could be done in 5. This isn't a bad choice. Games that rely on "level" to define your character's strength become quite linear. Those games penalize you for exploring, or at best fail to reward you for it. TES games focus on exploration, not on achievement.

Yes smithing is a bloody great idea

The skill slights increases it. For example from skill of ten in one handed to skill of 100 increases the blade damage by less than half the original damage of the blade. Mostly it's the perks. Which disappoints me.

I'm love the game but I am also a bit disappointed by this. I liked it before where you would automatically get your perks once you reached a certain skill level. Or at least you should be able to choose the perks once that skill has reached a certain level and not one perk per character level. That would bring back meaning to skill levels which in my opinion is important. The modding community will fix this its just sad that TES is evolving away from its roots.