The greatest MMO to date, and the only one offering one hundred percent freedom of choice.
One word: Freedom
You get to do whatever you want, you can kill people if you want, you can be a bountyhunter, a mindless miner chopping away on innocent rocks in the midle of space, for hours and hours, a dedicated corporate executive or a trader. Whatever you want to do, EVE gives you the possibility to do it, it also appeals to the more casual approach of gaming, since skills are being trained while offline as well as online, no more repeating the same action over and over simply to gain skills in it.
The controls are pretty easy, but the screen tends to get full of windows, this is all annoying at the get-go, but after a while you become used to it. The learningcurve is pretty steep, and it takes a while to get your character really going strong, since powerlevelling isn't an option. In EVE there's different securityratings on systems, basically anything from 0.5-1.0 is safe territory, and anything from 0.0-0.4 is territories where you might get blown to pieces by evilminded pirates. Also the constant wars over 0.0-territories makes people get blown to pieces. People like that will need new ships, thus people need to mine, thus the market steadily need insertion of goods, and all these things add to a living marketspace. Something that games like WoW or Everquest totally lack, since dying doesnt really cost that much.
All information you ever need in the game, is in the game as well. So going out looking on different sources of information isn't really that necessary. However, the reading can get a bit much at times, but the playerbase is really helpful and most people very friendly.
The techincal specifications of the game aint that hot. Low res textures in most cases, and the models are graphically dated. They have however captured the space-feel, and the soundtrack is one of the best in any game around. The sound otherwise isn't the best, but it gets the job done.
In the end EVE is for the mature gamers out there who actually want a challenge from their game, and also want to feel the total paranoia that is mining in low sec systems, expecting pirates to warp in to kill you at any time. I love it, and so should everyone else!