Yeah, I'm going to pick up Skyrim and am curious about this as well.
More curious on the mod scene. I've read so much on mods, mod managers, etc. it makes my head spin.
that's the thing. The DLC is basically candy. Elder Scrolls games--Bethesda games, really, are made great by the mod community.
I've developed two meta-pastimes over the years:
--adding movies to my Netflix queue (now 340+), never watching them
--browsing Nexus and reading about mods, adding maybe 10% of the ones I look at.
that's only recent, though, since I just started replaying it. Some of it is necessary, though--Sky UI, the texture pack and other texture enhancements, etc.