My impressions on the PC:
The Menus suck. Anyone remember NFS3: Hot Pursuit's Menus? Or High Stakes? I would love to see something like that again on the pc.
Cars handle awkwardly. My first gripe is there was a lag between my steering input and when the car would actually steer. Then I found out by putting Steering Assist to 'normal' instead of 'novice' or whatever it was, cut out the crap, but now I've found another issue.
I'm only using a 360 pad at the moment, the default control scheme has the accelerator trigger and the brake trigger as digital buttons instead of analogue. They reason for this is simply because the driver MS released for the pad puts the triggers on the same axis, meaning if you were to use the buttons as analogue, you could not use them at the same time.
For instance: Press R trigger, Z axis goes down, press L trigger, Z axis goes up. Press both at the same time? They cancel each other out. So you have a choice to make: Either use them as digital buttons, or use them as analogue and give up the ability to brake and gas at the same time. This is frustrating, using them as digital buttons means I'm either always hard breaking or hard accelerating.
The game looks beautiful. Interiors are very detailed. If your hood flies off, the engine bay of the car looks as it should.
Levels take forever to load, but I haven't defragged my hard drive in a while so that's probably subjective.
Damage is pretty realistic except for the fact that headlights never break. The whole front of your car can be smashed up; I've ripped the hood off my 135i, the bumper, and the entire front fascia, but the headlight's glass were still intact. After seeing Burnout Paradise crashes where glass goes flying everywhere during a crash, this leaves a lot to be desired.
Playing the game without some AA is disgusting.
7/10 - The game is very fresh, but I can see it getting old very quickly.
Oh, and as others have pointed out, the only thing it really shares with the Need For Speed franchise is its name.