My expectations were a bit more muted than many of yours, it seems, but I found it rather enjoyable. I was worried at first that my computer couldn't hack it as it performed horrendously during the land tutorial, even when I turned down the visual settings. I shut down a few processes and loaded her back up to play Brandywine Creek, and it ran pretty well at high settings (although I could see throttling back to medium being necessary for the full game. For the record, my computer specks:

2.4 ghz quad-core
2 gig ram
GeForce 8500 GT 512 MB
Vista 32

If figure the processor is probably fine, but I'm getting some bottlenecking at high settings with the graphics card and the ram, given the demands of Vista. The load times were a bit long, but under 1.5 minutes, usually about a minute.

Anyway, I didn't play through the whole thing as I wanted to just get a feel for it and then try the naval battle before I went back to working on my thesis (taking a coffee break now ), but It's about what I expected. It's not a terribly realistic representation of 18th century warfare, and it definitely feels like a total war game... but neither is it Imperial Glory or whatever that horrid game was called. Overall, I thought it was fun, and it fulfills a desire I've had since I first played the first MTW-- a Total war game set in the age of the musket. The animations may have been a bit sloppy, but I rarely zoom in close enough to tell; I have a hard enough time keeping track of all my units as it is, especially when I split my force as I did in the Brandywine Creek battle.

As for the battle itself, I began by attempting to place my artillery, which I attempted to position in the exact same locations described by Rhyfelwyr, above. Unfortunately, just as one of my batteries moved atop the hill overlooking the clearing directly in front of the main crossing, it came under fire by the U.S. artillery which scored a direct hit within the first few shots: a blow right down the front of one of my still-limbered pieces, taking out the entire team and the piece itself. The other team (there are only two pieces per horse arty battery-- don't know if that's just how things are or if that's specific to the demo) got spooked and took off, reforming some time later in the woods behind my general. After that I just sort of screwed around to see what I could see. I sent the light infantry into the woods directly across the creek from the main U.S. force with orders to skirmish (as someone else said, this didn't spread them out at all, which surprised me; maybe I was doing something wrong), and sent the Hessiens up behind them to occupy the main force while I sent the rest of my units around the other side. Watched the fireworks for a bit before exiting out. I'll play more later.

I will say that I can tell I will enjoy placing my artillery and watching it tear up enemy ranks; I can't wait untill I have more substantial field pieces at my disposal than four 6-pndrs of horse arty! CA seems to have managed to implement the use of formations well while still retaining the Total War feel and customizability; you can still spread your line out thin or give them more depth. I'll give it another play later tonight and see how it goes.