It's got all the basic ingredients: huge universe full of stations and whatnot, potential for exploration, factions, nuanced trading, a variety of roles to choose from (pirate, merchant, bounty hunter, etc.), ship and parts upgrades, and so on. I suppose there'll be a mission system. As SuicideBunny says, features such as "inflatable asteroid bases" for players, ship boarding actions, seamless landing, and so on will be implemented in the future.
What really matters to me is how well ships handle and how combat proceeds (otherwise what's the point in doing all that other shit?), and the answer in the case of handling is FUCKING FANTASTIC. It manages to convey the feeling of flying a fucking spaceship (which many games, notably the X series, haven't pulled off well or at all) while offering a complex control scheme and quasi-Newtonian physics.
The one downside I've noticed in YouTube videos is that pursued NPCs just glide along like retards and don't pull off fancy maneuvers such as fishhooks (sharp right/left, shortly followed by sharp 180), turn 'n' burns, rotating in place (while continuing to move "forward" inertially) to fire on pursuers to the stern, "sliding" "up," "down," etc., yanking back the throttle and smashing reverse thrusters, or really anything else other than gliding along "forward" like retards and maneuvering only in compass directions as though they're planes.
I'm much more interested in initiating wreckage-creation procedures on other players, though, so this doesn't bother me too much. Also, it's still in beta.