Okaaaaaaay, been playing it for a while now and here are my thoughts:
1) Controls are fine. I don't know what you guys were looking for, but this is what I call arcade controls. It's not like Sega style arcade, it is Atari style. It's somewhere between Burnout and SF Rush without the flying. It is completely what I expected.
2) Graphics performance is a bit disappointing. It's no DiRT 2 but it still does pretty well. Running everything max it goes 30 but simply drop environment to Medium and no other changes and it's running 60 and I don't even notice a difference. For some reason if you have CCC set to SSAA it has weird shadow lines, so you have to run in MSAA. It's not as nice but runs very well.
3) I really, really hate forced introductions and wonder why the racing genre in particular has taken to them so strongly. Let me start the story when I want to start the story, let me adjust the options before selecting my character, let me turn off the stupid guide-you-by-the-hand shit and especially the lady speaking things to me. I would much, much, much rather have help menus that I manually access to find out how to do things.
4) The means of selecting and deselecting the next goal on the GPS is kind of a hassle. The whole map screen definitely could have been done better.
5) Races are fun, driving around is fun, customization should be pretty neat. Are you able to change characters later or are you forever stuck with the one you picked?
6) I greatly appreciate the quick "restart challenge" ability. Not all open world games have this sort of common sense.