One new tidbit that stuck out for me is that in solar systems there will sometimes still be planets that are really really far away. In one of the interview videos (I think it was the Giant Bomb one) Murray said even though that demo had two planets and a bunch of moons close together, there are other planets in that system so far away you'll need a fuel upgrade to reach them. He said he likes the feel of having to travel for 15 minutes which gives a game a sense of space. It's likely a balancing act between the feel of 70's sci-fi covers and the feel of Elite or Space Engine.
I like the feel of traveling for long stretches of time in Wind Waker or Shadow of the Colossus, but that's usually because you're passing by constantly changing terrain and scenery. In Elite when you're flying to a planet that's extremely far away you're flying through nothing but deep space. Sometimes I'll sit the controller down and check twitter while while doing this. Yeah, in NMS there isn't going to be something "interesting" happening every 15 seconds, and I love that an open-world is intentionally doing this because too many open-world games feel too dense in my opinion, but there's a difference between pretty-looking terrain and empty space.
On the other hand, I wonder if this means multiple systems will be in the game. I'm not talking about just multiple suns. That's what most people think of when they think of systems with multiple stars, but in Elite and Space Engine it usually doesn't turn out like that. Usually what you get are two or three stars, each with their own systems of planets, orbiting each other. The distances at which they orbit each other are usually very small on a cosmological scale but very large on an intra-system scale, like 50-100 astronomical units or something. In Elite it can take 10 minutes to fly between multiple systems at max warp. I've always wondered if systems like this will be in No Man's Sky.