When you enter, you have absolutely no idea wth is going on, and nobody else does either. General chat is plagued with panic and pleas for invites into a nonexistent raid. In battlegrounds you can glean the rules relatively quickly, but Wintergrasp objectives are very different from anything else we've seen. There are factories and siege weapons and nodes on the map with unfamiliar icons. An in-game tutorial or questline for first-timers is probably necessary, although the warzone atmosphere is highly effective when you've had no prior exposure.
What really made the whole experience for me was that none of the rezzers were functioning. It was pretty hypnotizing watching the rez timer repeatedly tick from 26 seconds remaining back to 30. Basically you could rez by relogging if the Horde took your insignia, but if they didn't, you had to run back to your corpse, get ganked again by campers, and hope that one of them would take enough pity to loot you so that you can relog in a safer place.
By a "safer place," I suppose I am referring to the graveyards. Blizz apparently wants to discourage camping, as evidenced by their design of EotS; the Wintergrasp graveyards are placed on top of steeply sloped snow mounds, so that melee on the ground would be unable to walk up to the graveyard to farm kills. Unfortunately this meant you couldn't get back to the rezzer if you jumped off as a ghost and attempted to seek a rezzer that wasn't on strike in an adjacent zone. Also, snow mounds aren't stopping shadowstep rogues, ferals (wtf?), and Hordies dropping from their flying mounts because some noob hilariously implemented the unflyable zone aura as a lawlbuff that you can click off rather than a debuff.
Not to mention there were about 10 Alliance, and hundreds of Horde. I'm sure this is just a minor detail, and that non-instanced zone pvp will be a completely balanced game on servers with 5:1 Horde to Alliance ratios and vice versa. Just like how instanced pvp is perfectly balanced without using any gear-based metrics for matchups. Then there's the problem of non-instanced pvp having the Shatt effect — the last thing pvpers want is moar lag. It will be interesting to see if and how Blizz attempts to address any of these issues.
Best of all were these graphical display delights that appeared whenever I attempted to cast.
Sexy leet perspective transform skillz.
I'm looking forward to seeing the Lake Wintergrasp experience improve, seeing as it's about the only thing it can do at this point.
