I played it last night and really enjoyed it. A lot of the buildings and edicts are the same, but the people seem much more efficient and the traffic flow is much faster. I suspect many of the changes were done "under the hood" to counter the frustration of your workers wandering around aimlessly or getting stuck in a month-long traffic jam.

Couple of things I noticed:
--Looks like you can now connect your apartments and tenements to the electric grid for air conditioning. An apartment with the +15 upgrade is now the same as a house.
--The entertainment buildings now have a "maximum tourist spending" figure. Not sure how that works, as there are no tourists in the demo, but I'd guess they've revamped tourism, as a lot of people were frustrated with making money off tourists.

Looking forward to this one, already got it pre-ordered from Amazon.