After having played 30 + hours by now I came along with a few things to think about.

So far, Skyrims looks very good, in some cases even great. As a PC player I run the game on high quality settings, nearly as it was suggested by the game. That made me ponder about the different technical aspects of the game which I'd like to share. So here they are

- overall performance is good although loading and saving sometimes causes little freezes up to a few seconds
- textures are fine until you do not come to closely to it (watching a forest of birch trees around Rifton is great, watching a single birch tree is not), this seems to apply to most of the ground and wall textures as well as for those textures of dead elements like clothes, barrels and so on
- shadows are ok but even on highest settings they are blurry and pixelated
- when you look at the game in wireframe mode (open console with ^, then type twf to enable it) you will see that all models have a fixed amount of polygons and also a fixed LOD, no signs of tesselation or so - you can even see this in the game itself when you watch a dragon from far away coming closer to you, the model detail does transform aprubtly
- not many details in facial and hair animation - faces are ok but they do not express very much, hair is just a fixed thing
- animations are sometimes a little clumsy - when you fight a dragon at a narrow place and you hit the dragon until it cannot fly anymore it looks kinda stupid when the dragon "crashes" into the site
- the AI seems nice, it is good to see that bandits and rogues will not attack you until you are too close t them
- sometimes you come across clipping errors, not so often but it happens

Recognizing this makes my ask the question if the engine was really a complete new one. If so, the developers could made it better (at least for PC players). Don't misjudge me in this case, I think it's good but technically it seems to be more like an update of the Gamebryo engine that was used in Oblivion.