Necro because I can.
Reading this you may think I think otherwise, but lets get one thing strait from the offset, Skyrim is a freaking awesome game, it's very pretty, very open, very immersive....
It's also horribly paced in many aspects, none of the guilds are very long or deep, you pretty much complete a few main quests (especially mages/companion) with a couple of the "radiant" fetch/kill quests dropped around between them, then you're running the shop.
Dungeons also have very little pace, being a predictable "weak foes, repeated puzzles, big boss" formula though I welcome the predictable short cuts out because god knows I hate slogging back through the dungeon. I have however got to massively compliment that almost every dungeon I've been in has had a cool little back story if you have a look around, and I'll admit some of them break the formula a little.
The skill trees have no pace or balance, some skills are just completely useless, or the useful stuff requires little investment or the useful stuff only comes along at the end (lockpicking, skill 100, 0 perks given), and some are horribly OP and easily spammable (ohgod smiting/enchanting/alchemy)
Loot tables, oh god, why do dwemer have gold, imperial legion equipment and amulets of the nine divines scattered around, morrowind had the dwemer using their own currency, why not reiterate that? Could use some tweaking, along with the weight of dragon bones/scales, the guy with that idea can fall in a well, jeeze
Encounter tables like to roller-coaster, you will very suddenly start encountering the next version of foe you get a level or 2 of hard encounters where the boss is one shotting you with an ebony warhammer/fancy new lightning bolt spell, then stuff catches up and you start to just ease through them again.
AI still paths pretty badly and has no sense of self preservation this is emphasised by friendly NPC's who get stuck behind, or jump in the way of your sword, or by hostile NPC's that like to surrender for 5 or 6 seconds to re-gen a tiny sliver of health before standing up again.
Auto third person and overly long animation for killing moves frustrate me, sure it's cool I beheaded a guy, but his 3 friends are turning me into a handbag all the while. It also limits the usefulness of werewolf transformations because that transition is so goddamn long, and any kill animation takes forever.
On the subject of werewolves, they suck, pretty hard, the lack of equipment on transforming means you take a damage drop if you're a weapon user, and take an armour drop as an armour user, along with any cool enchantments you have. Vampires too, it isn't as difficult to live as one in Skyrim, but they have also lost some power.
The lack of any major racial differences, class system, or permanent birth sign, along with lackluster vamp/were, and no skills that are just mediocre (unarmed/armoured) reeks of Bethesda not wanting to give you the chance to make any bad decisions, then they lump you with a perk system that is frankly not all that great, and some bad decisions to make with that (lockpicking is pretty meh apart from one or two things, a large amount of the speech tree gives you gold and stuff, but by the time you hit level 10 you don't have money problems, and when you get mid twenties you just want to drop all your money as individual coins and swim in it)
All in all though, as I said at the beginning, I love Skyrim, it's like a GM has picked up a new game system for your group, and although it isn't that great a system, and they're not all that confident at creating dungeons yet, they've built a beautiful, expansive and rather incredible game experience.
Oh and the UI can go drop itself in a well, right next to the dragon loot guy.
I can't wait for the creators kit though, I have many ideas about things I want to try "fix"
tl;dr It's a pretty great game, but I like to nitpick things