Seemingly eliminating attributes in favor of "do you want to increase Health, Stamina, or Magcicka", reducing the amount of skill, etc. all point to a lesser "stats" type roleplaying game. Which seems kind of silly considering 13+ million World of Warcraft players seem to like that stuff. But honestly stats were never my favorite part of roleplaying games.
But where's the npc interaction? The only thing we've heard about this is how conversations are handled is improved. I'd be the first to point out every open world game in the last 3 years has improved upon what Oblivion did in this regard. Even GTA4 had better npc interaction and more interesting morale choices to make. I'm not saying any one way to do this is the correct way, I'm just saying that even non roleplaying games have advanced to the point of having good npc interaction and I've yet to see Skyrim present much of any improvement.
The last thing I can think of is other ways of evolving your character besides stats. The character creator sounds better, but it doesn't sound as good as Eve's "Incarna" or the now defunct APB's character creator, or Fable's awesome way of letting you modify your character continuously over the course of the game.
So... in regard ot those three things I mentioned. How is Skyrim any better? Or forget that, how is it even competitive? Maybe they do have something planned, if so I'd like to see it as I'm not about to assume it's just going to be there.