I thought the first one was terribly hilarious.

Well, although Mass Effect does use the knocked out until end of battle system as well, maybe Bioware decided to ratched up the difficulty exactly because you wouldn't really die unless ALL your characters went down. I would expect them to level the battles so you wouldn't come out unscathed each time and would at least usually lose a few members in the fights. Mass Effect (granted I played in on PC) was fairly easy to me, even on hard, there wasn't really any fight that I had problems with except one where the stupid Krogan had a melee insta-kill attack and we were in a small space. That was annoying.

The early marketing was someone being afraid that this was too much of a "hard core RPG".
If you don't mind me asking what about Baldur's Gate combat did you hate? Was it the infinity engine in general or something specific about BG1?

Yeah. I'm trying to keep in mind that that was probably just some absurd bullshit the marketing department came up with, but I still have trouble doing that. It's like a satire of the sort of juvenile material we usually get when developers start talking about exploring dark, mature themes, except I'm pretty sure they weren't joking.
I've watched a few of the videos that have been released, but honestly THIS IS THE NEW SHIIIIT is the one I always think of when I hear "Dragon Age." I suppose I should try to watch some of the more recent ones.
I dislike Infinity and Aurora combat in general. I don't like "phased" real-time combat anyway, but D&D is really not well suited to it, especially when you're controlling an entire party. Infinity pretty much combines all of the drawbacks of real-time and turn-based combat, without any of the strengths of either. BG2 and Planescape were good enough games to overcome that deficiency, but it was still a deficiency.
I disliked it even more in Baldur's Gate 1 because low-level D&D combat is always frustrating, but that's really a tangent.

Sounds like you may not like the combat in DAO... at least on the PC it does play more like the old infinity engine games (with a heavy MMO influence). From what I've read though, the console versions can play more like an action RPG (Mass Effect style combat) and that you "can" play the PC like that but you'll probably have to turn the difficulty down. On the plus side when you lose party members in combat they don't actually die (think of it more as being wounded/knocked out, and they're back when the battle is over with injuries).
If I were you, I'd look at some game play videos especially combat ones.
I'm fairly confident that you'd like the story side of it, I'm just not sure about the game play mechanics for you.

I remember seeing the E3 video where the party kills a black dragon. It looked like it was about as much fun as sitting in your friend's bedroom watching him heal a raid in World of Warcraft.
Still, I'll see what else I can find when I get home. If the story is interesting, I can probably suffer the combat, as long as it's not completely, irredeemably horrible like some RPGs I could name.

The problem is going to be that what you're describing is going to be a personal preference thing. Based on what they're trying to accomplish they did a superb job, but it sounds like you don't like the basic concept of what they were trying to do. No matter how well they did it you may not like it at all. =/
Maybe find a local friend that has it, or try renting it on a console and seeing if what they've done on the console is more to your liking?

Unfortunately, I don't own a console and I have no local friends, so those are out :p
I think whether I take to it or not will depend on a) how much interaction you actually have with the character you're controlling, and b) how much babysitting your partners require. If I just have to sit there with my chin in my hand watching my fighter auto-attack, pausing every few seconds to root through Morrigan's spellbook to make sure she casts Magic Missile instead of just standing there like a fool, I probably won't like it. If I need to take more active control of one character, and if I can trust my allies to make themselves useful (well, as useful as AI squadmates ever have been) without my constant guidance, I'd probably be more receptive to it. I couldn't tell much about what the player was actually doing from the dragon kill video, as I recall.
By the way, I don't really mean to be a buzzkill in every thread I post in, I just have too many negative thoughts and not enough positive ones :p

Granted I haven't actually played this game yet, but you can choose as to what level of micromanagement you have over your party. you can choose logic/scripts/gambits for your other party members so they behave in certain ways during combat without interference, or you can pick every single spell from their spellbook if you wish... not sure how effective the AI is when you're nto micromanaging, but the option is there. At that point it should (if it works right) be sort diablo'ish in terms of click to attack someone with some AI party members.

only 41 minutes till i can play it lol !!!!

I've taken the day off work tomorrow so I can go pick up my collectors edition from GAME.
Not as close as 41mins, but by this time tomorrow I should be several hours into the game :)

Any reports on performance?
I meet the "recommended" requirements for RAM and video card, but only just, and my processor is a dual-core, not the recommended quad-core. What I've learned over the past ten or so years of 3D acceleration is that minimum requirements means "it starts," and if you don't comfortably meet the recommended requirements, the game will look and run worse than something you bought three years ago (an exception was Doom 3, which looked rather nice and played well even at low-detail 1024x768 on the old system I had at the time).

http://kotaku.com/5397283/dragon-age-origins-+-playstation-3-versus-pc
"I have a relatively modest gaming computer, all things considered. It's got one of the first AMD Phenom processors in it from a few years back, 2GB of RAM, and a ATI Radeon 3850HD card in it. Not too powerful by today's standards, but still a ways out from obsolescence. While installing Dragon Age: Origins yesterday I envisioned a game that was slightly less stuttery than the PlayStation 3 version I had spent several days playing previously. I figured I would start it up, create a character, wander about a bit, and then maybe go to bed. Four hours later I was exhausted, but still reluctant to part from the much sharper, much prettier game I discovered." - Kotaku

Yay. My copy just arrived and it actually *is* in a wooden box.

That's Japan for you. I remember importing a CD once and it actually have cherry blossoms in the case... WTF, they package CD with cherry blossom petals?
with that said I wish I had a wooden box for my CE version. :(