I can practically guarantee you'll enjoy MOM if you stick with it. :)
Unfortunately there's a backside. You'll keep asking the questions why a similar game haven't been made yet and why there's no MOM2. These questions will haunt you until you try Age of Wonders (I like the first best.) which will ease the pain a bit but only for a while.
Yeah GOG is great. The best thing that happened to computer games since, well these golden oldies was released. :)
Ps.
I have high expectations on Elemental - War of Magic. It's said to be inspired by MOM, just like Age of Wonders but I fear that it too will fall short.

Hey TheJoe, we got another Guild convert! Bring out the tower cannon, let's show this town how to party like it's 1399.

Been playing MOM for a couple of hours now and so far so good. Haven't quite grasphed 10% of it, but its coming along. I've been watching a video play thru by TiegonBerry on YouTube to help with the learning curve. He is very good. Playing the IMPOSSIBLE level in fact. I watched just enough to get the grasp of getting started. I don't think I should watch much more since I don't want it to affect my own playing style. I'm a HUGE fan of the CIVs, so the gameplay is pretty much second nature for me. But just needed help getting started. (Can't wait for Civ 5 infact... might actually pre-order that one; I never pre-order anything. Always wait for it to go on sale in a year, lol).
Ya, I had already wondered why MOM was never at least revamped (like Pirates! was). They were supposed to release MOM2, but I'm sure that all when in the toilet when MicroProse went under. It's a shame, but at the same time not really. I grew up with Atari and C-64 games (in fact my first game system was Pong!), so I can live with the graphics. The controls are a bit clunky to todays standards, but functional and the music can get repetative, but at least turned off. I messed around with the DOSBOX settings and have the graphics looking better, so it's all good.
Gametap has Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, so I'll try that if I ever get board of MOM (it'll be a long while). Elemental - War on Magic (which I never heard of, so thanks for the heads-up on that) looks to have a release date of Aug 24, 2010!... so that is cool. I'll keep it on my radar. I'm afraid though that even if someone was to revamp MOM they still would screw it up somehow. *sigh*

August 24 have a big mark in my calendar. :)
There have been MOM projects to upgrade graphics, making it windows friendly, add multiplayer and so on but I don't think any of them was finished. Having it on GOG is good enough for me. :)

The good news is it looks like Elemental War of Magic is by Stardock, the same people who developed and published Galactic Civilization II and published Sins of a Solar Empire, so hopefully this means it will be at least worth playing. Although, I've never played either of those games, but I have read good things about them. Also, looks like the game was supposed to be released in 2009, so maybe they delayed it to be sure it was ready for prime time.

Stardock is more a minus than a plus I think.
Galactic Civilizations never interested me mainly because they aren't that deep 4X games and Sins of a Solar Empire is fun but also not very deep.
So I agree the game will probably be fun but MOM is a very deep game and Stardock have never done a deep game yet.