Although the game is not finished, what we see in the trailers are the best representations that both EA and Bioware are comfortable with showing us before the game's release. As with most games, there can and will be final touches to polish the game. For the most part, however, it will look very similar. Again, this is what they feel most comfortable with showing us. They can improve on models and animations during alpha and beta testing as with most of the games in the genre.
It isn't really fair to judge a game by just the trailers and the trailers alone, but keep in mind that there is a gigantic industry that focuses around just trying to get us to impulse buy the game just by how it looks. Sometimes they are successful and sometimes they are not. What really bugs me about this and the other trailers for The Old Republic is that they are trying to market the game already when they haven't started beta testing yet. I know that the original intention was to show us how the progression would play out in the game, but to me, it failed at the actual explanation. It was just a montage of cool people in cool armor shooting cool guns at cool enemies. That seems to be the formula for creating a generic trailer.
So on one hand, we have the rational thought that explains that this is an unfinished game and they are just trying to show us how it looks so far and to show how the game plays. On the other hand, this content is also being used as marketing material to spark the public's interest in this game. So would it be better if EA and Bioware just stopped releasing trailers until the beta test and near the release and stuck with text and graphic explanations about the game's features, or should they continue with the trailers and game play demos?
PS: Also, I can't recall a 3D MMORPG that actually has "amazing" animations. Some are pretty
decent, but it is just something that developers of the genre really care about.
EDIT: There were some posts earlier that already stated a number of the points made in this post as well. They kind of just popped up while I was writing.