Great game, good thing they focused more on realism, long wait for proper voice chat, addictive multiplayer.
Luckily this has been changed again in Battlefield 3. The focus on more serious, tactical squad teamplay works out pretty well (especially after the voice chat got fixed).
Although we would all like to have 64-player servers, the max. amount of 24 players on console with the downscaled maps aren't a problem at all. The warfare is always there and intense as ever.
The balance of the game is good, except for the fact that some guns have got unlocks which are a bit over/underpowered. There's a whole bunch of unlocks, both weapons as unlocks, aswell as unlocks for vehicles, which is really great. You can customize your gun/vehicle just like you want and every setup with your gun makes it behave differently.
Conclusion:
Battlefield 3 is a great game and is getting polished from time to time with patches. The reason I won't give this game a 10 is due to the fact it wasn't polished at all at release and had many problems, such as lag (at Tehran Highway in particular), and horrible voice chat quality. Also the squad system was bugged, and it took about a quarter to just join a server with your squad and try to all end up in one squad.