No player housing at release; likely to be added down the road.

As for building your own housing, the Hearthfire approach (in fact the approach to a dynamic gameworld found in all the ES games since Morrowind) is ... not very satisfying as far as I'm concerned. Basically as a player you are not a designer; at best you choose among two or three structures in a fixed location. In game mechanics terms, all the possible houses are already designed and built and placed; you're just choosing which one becomes visible. The same applies to other "dynamic" elements in these games, like the wrecking of whatever that town was in Oblivion, or growing a Telvanni tower in Morrowind. All versions of the town or building are pre-created; by completing the quests and progressing the story you just trigger different versions as being visible (with the game design carefully preventing you from watching as the thing pops into existence).

The pre-release descriptions of Hearthfire made me think there would actually be some player creativity involved; I was quite disappointed to find out there was no such thing

If there was GOING to be building in the game, I would prefer genuine building, where I create something according to my own design, completely different from everybody else's, where there was nothing previously. Of course, doing that in an MMO involves all kinds of technical challenges, and that is not the direction ESO is taking, so I don't see it happening Short of that, just let me pick among a few different house models instead of dressing up the same thing as if I were building, when I'm actually doing no such thing