Since the game is now freemium to play. I thought I'd give it a try and here are the random thoughts that came into my head. (Played about 3 hours or so.)
 
1. ) Its an MMO ass MMO - More tabs and menus and buttons and character sheets than you can shake a stick at.
 2.) Reading is part of an MMO - not a lot of voicework. read pages and pages and pages upon boxes of pages of text to do this level 1 quest
3.) Slightly unusual camera and movement - call me a noob, but clicking on the ground usually walks there in some MMO's, I don't know if I haven't found the option yet in LOTRO but all walking is WASD. Game plays not based on camera sometimes so if you're facing 90 degrees to the right on your camera, pressing W will make you walk to the right. Not go forward where the camera points. (Unless you hit right click to set the camera behind your dude.)
4.) Needs better ways to point you where you're going - call me a console action rpg / action adventure noob, but when you get a quest and I set it to my "to do" maybe you could just give me a nice arrow to follow?
5.) Thankfully the item descriptions make sense - "this item is monster trophy. sell it to the npcs for money." at least it tells you that, because in some MMO's you don't even know what's some sort of rare item you should keep for later quests or crafting.
6.) That freemium system gets explained early on and is integrated well.
7.) Kill 3 of this and 5 of that - definitely getting a ton of this
8.) What made me stop the 3 hour session - during the 5th or so kill this quest I was getting some lag freezes while going to places so when I got the 7th quest and I was freezing while walking towards the place where I need to kill stuff, I thought, "...maybe thats enough for this play session".
 
And that's what my experience was of LOTRO's first few hours. Verdict? Its definitely an MMO. A fantasy MMO. To anybody who hasn't played an MMO before, all these crazy buttons and menus and tabs and skill trees won't make any bit of sense. Without proper guidance, you wouldn't even know where "Talk to OLAF" is. It won't really provide obvious arrows to OLAF. Its enjoyable if you're used to MMO conventions, and its free.
 
To namedrop a comparison though, I think Guild Wars is slightly easier to understand.

LOTR needs its own version of "old republic" where they go far into the past or far into the future and are giving more freedom to do something interesting, instead of disservicing Tolkien's work directly.