In your own words.Follow

Aye, there is plenty of PvE in War. Myself, when i first started on beta, was only expecting to do the PvE aspect of it. Never been a big fan of PvP, but,,,It dragged me in kicking and shouting, strung me up till i begged for more, literally. The way pvp laps over into pve is seamless, and not at all like id experienced on other mmo`s. You can join instanced scenarios like in wow but there are specific/large areas dedicated to Realm v Realm conflict, no waiting involved.
Its hard for me to put into words how it compares to other games, ive hammered WoW to hell n back but nowhere near as much as some have, so for me to give you examples of how it excells or fails would be pointless.But trust me, you have to see it to believe it.

I know Jord will be doing an indepth review at some point soon, and there will be plenty of others im sure that will answer your questions more than i could. But yeh, there are plenty of pve opportunities on War.

My 2 cents will mostly contrast War to Everquest (grand-daddy of all the games the OP listed and my all-time favourite) with some WoW references.

zones: are tight and full in the sense that you don't spend 25 minutes running across and empty zone full of trivial mobs to get somewhere. Mostly a seamless world (like WoW) with some zoning between larger areas. Actual look of the zones is grittier and more realistic than WoW, likely what EQ would be if it was totally revamped to today's graphic standards. There are some neat interactive featurs (like cannons) that are fun. Flight masters allow you to travel across wide areas, but rather than a long flight on a griffon (WoW when I played it) you get a loading screen and poof where you wanted to be.

NPC; in warcamps and villages it is pretty lively. For an EQ player it would be sort of Thurgadin (lots of flavor text) meets a quest-heavy place like Temple of Sol Ro. The icons over the NPC heads will be familar to anyone that dabbled in WoW at all and the roles of the different NPC seem clearly defined (as in no bankers that give quests causing bugs in the game ala EQ back in the day). NPC in the PVE world are constantly fighting each other. At first (as an EQ player) you will feel like you are kill stealing because its hard to tell them apart from the other newb characters and you want to take their opponent to complete some quests.

Quests: normal PVE content follows the WoW mechanic of decent xp for doing the quests. I personally got some of the same feel of a "quest grind" so not sure there is huge replayability in the same starting area. I also felt you did alot of quests in the 1-10 range to see any useful rewards gear wise --in that I just mean something crummy you can equip to not have the level 1 look. Also, very little variety in what you were doing for the quests (alot of kill 5...)

Public quests are the big shiny new thing. They are fun, but placing and winning rolls to get the good rewards can be tiresome. Also, you end up doing some repeatedly to get the influence (think faction in EQ) to be able to get your rewards from the influence vendor. However, the influence rewards are decent and its not like it takes weeks (EQ) to gain the influence. Coupled with the PQ rewards a character can gear up pretty good. Some of the public quests seem to take a very long time, however in the open beta it was mostly random pick-up-not-grouping types grinding them out. An organizecd warband would eat most of this content very efficiently.

PVP: works great from what I saw. The scenarios are very battleground from WoW but (and this is huge) you get xp from doing them. So no matter how awesome you are at dominating the tier one scenarios you will eventually level. You also get renown (another faction for EQ types) which unlocks very nice gear rewards. You can PVP at level 1 because entering the scenarios boosts your stats to level 8 (so imagine built in temperance every time you zone in). The downside is you won't have many spells/abilities and a level 9-11 character seems much more powerful than a level 8. On the bright side, I tried levelling a character soley in scenarios and it worked fine. It also meant I was capped for renown for each rank (level) and by level 6 I had decent gear without having done any of the PVE content.

Realm vs. Realm feels more like real pvp and not a capture the flag game. In open Beta it was harder to get into this (with most people trying out multiple classes in tier 1 content), but capturing objectives and watching your back was a blast when I got the chance. I hope this content is as active and contested as it should be after launch. It should also mean that any level of guild or group can alter their sides status in the war.

Gold & loot: Gold seems to be of minor importance thus far in the game (though you want your mount at level 20 so its like WoW that way). Much loot is not tradable. Certain types of drops will show as usable by you when you are asked to roll on them (nbg rolling is built into the game) but show as usable by other classes when they are looking at the same item (so the black orc will roll on that dark elf item you think you need). Once you get used to which drops do this its not a big deal.

Builds: War uses a build system like WoW (vs. the AA system of EQ) so each class has 3 paths to specialize in with the ability to respec. Spells and abilities are available for each level from the core trainers (again like Wow and not the inconsistent system EQ has of loot-quest-research-vendor depending on your class).

Cities: right now 1 capital city for each side (very EQ 2 in that respect) with something planned in respects to the other 4 racial captitals that were removed during beta (will they be full-fledged cities added down the road or more of a pure pvp objective --I'm not sure).

Map and tome of knowledge: The map reminds me of the WoW map, it reveals as you travel and has a mini-map in the top corner of the UI. Quests, etc. show up as coloured dots. The tome of knowledge should appeal to EQ players, to me its an idea right in the spirit of what EQ started as. It would be a simplification to call it a quest journal.

Lore: Warhammer has a ton of lore to draw on, after all WoW built their game on it. And (as far as I know) there are no space kittens (EQ). The PVP design of the game removes the grey-area of being a race-traitor but also stops later developers from turning the game into a happy muppet show where we all get along (EQ- plane of knowledge, shar val, Crescent Reach to name a few).

Classes: Some I ignored completely. The Shadow Warrior is somewhat of a ranger (EQ) with the stance aspect I recall WoW warriors having. For EQ players nearly every class in War would seem like a strange hybrid. For example the Shaman/Archmage are range healers (but mostly HoT at lower levels at least) with some buffs and debuff, but also a definate ability to deal damage. I've had several people tell me that Witch elf plays the same as a WoW rogue.