Bought the game, installed the game, patched the game. It runs fairly smooth, even on my old AMD Athlon Phenom 9250 quad core/ATI Radeon HD 3870 system with 2 GB RAM, at mostly high settings without any anti-aliasing. I haven't experienced any crashes to desktop whatsoever, which can't be said for a modded down Oblivion or a Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas. But it's not bug free. On my system, certain FX elements were invisible or only partly there, like fire, webbing and some environmental and magical effects. Not a critical bug, but enough to kill the immersion a little. I waited playing the game any further and found a patch made by a third party to resolve the issue earlier today. The fire and stuff returned, but the new shadow FX settings caused the game to stutter, although opening the .ini file the patch supplies and setting all shadow-related values to false seems to correct that as well.
In case anyone else here has the same problem as I did, you can find the patch that solved my problem here: http://enbdev.com/enbseries_skyrim_v0089patch2.zip [http://enbdev.com/enbseries_skyrim_v0089patch2.zip]. It overwrites nothing in your game dir so if it causes you trouble, it's easy to remove.
No other problems so far, besides one small corridor in a dungeon I explored where my fps suddenly slowed down to the point where it could be counted on half of one hand for no apparent reason, but that went away as mysteriously and soon as it came. All in all, I am content.
So, long story short, while the core of the game seems properly made, there are a lot of inadequacies that the modding community will likely descend upon like a pack of vultures.
That said, I have to say some bad things about the UI. What was Bethesda thinking making the hotkey system so damned convoluted? More importantly, why isn't there a key to empty one or both of your hands? For example, hotkey a one handed sword you have multiple of. Press the hotkey once, you equip one. Press it again, you equip two. Good luck trying to get rid of them afterwards, especially the leftie sword; you'll have to switch it with another item or do it manually. Equipping sword and spell is likewise bogged down by lack of key control support. Since you can only block while equipping a single weapon, or a weapon and shield, if you have a weapon and a spell readied, you will have to go into the UI, pausing the game, to deactivate the spell, and then you can block. Equipping yourself on the fly with weapons and magic was extremely easy in Oblivion. I hoped Skyrim would maintain the trend of increasingly streamlined gameplay, but sadly not.
Similarly, the UI exhibits similar weak points, such as the lack of a unified menu that lets you scroll between stats, equipment and magic with a simple action. No, the equipment, spell and skill menus are separate, and you'll have to go out of one to enter the other.
Other small details were left unattended. For example, the Take All function when looting a container object only works if said container holds items. You'll have to Tab out instead if you open an empty container, an inconvenience that Bethesda's Fallout games didn't have.
