Hubby checking in. 
Short version: I really, really like this game. If you like deep, immersive first-person role-playing games, you probably will too. I played both previous games in the series (loved/finished Arena, gave up on Daggerfall) and was really looking forward to this one.
I have indeed been playing the beta. The main reason I stopped a couple of weeks ago was to give myself the chance to enjoy the final game – I was starting to make progress on the main quest, and wanted to do that with a “real” character, not a throwaway I created for the beta.
The system requirements are relatively steep. My older system (p3/500, 768MB ram, TNT2 Ultra) looked like a slideshow at anything but the minimum settings, so I was playing on Dangerosa’s machine (Athlon 1800+, 256MB DDRam, GeForce 2MX), where it looked quite decent. My new machine (p4/2.2, 1GB PC800 RDRAM, GeForce 4 ti4600) runs it at 1280x960 with maxed detail and quite decent framerates. The biggest differentiator seems to be your video card – the NetImmerse engine it’s built on (as are Freedom Force and Dark Age of Camelot, by the way) really leverages high-end video cards.
A note on character advancement: the way the system works is kind of neat – it’s a hybrid between “traditional” leveling advancement through experience and the newer “improving skills through use” school of thought. What happens is that (a) your skills improve through use (or training) and once you’ve improved the 10 major and minor skills for your class (which you can define yourself) a total of 10 points, you level up. This makes leveling pretty easy early on through training, by the way.
My advice to other folks would be to look carefully at the skills in the class you choose or define – improving them will be the way you level up, and leveling is how you improve your basic stats (strength, agility, etc) which in turn improves your figured stats (health, mana, fatigue). Choose skills that you plan on using a lot.
A couple of notable things about Morrowind:
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The world is entirely hand-crafted. Not only can you interact with damn near everything, but all of the 300,000-plus objects in it were placed deliberately.
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Character creation is awesomely flexible. If you’re familiar with the previous games in the series (Arena and Daggerfall), you’ll know what I’m talking about. If not, suffice it to say that there are no limits on the way you can define your play-style. Want to hack your way through? Can do. Prefer blasting away with magic? Ok. Want to sneak past everything? Sure. Up for talking your way out of situations? It’s actually possible.
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The system requirements are pretty steep. This is both a good thing and a bad one – if you have a “lesser” system, you’ll be turning off options in order to get decent framerates. On the other hand, those of us with high-end systems finally have a game that actually uses all of that horsepower.
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You can interact with (read: kill, if you so desire) every NPC in the game. Some of them are really tough, but all of them are mortal. And there’s only one you have to leave alive to finish the main quest.
Others have done a far better job of reviewing the game than I can, especially in this limited space. Check the Gold Guide section at Gone Gold (www.gonegold.com) for links to all kinds of reviews.