Grimbeorn
Tribe of Judah Star Wars: The Old Republic Sith Em
If I missed it, please forgive me. But isn't the elephant in the room the fact that there was already a Star Wars MMO and it was horrible.
Actually, there were plenty of people that liked Star Wars: Galaxies. It may not have come anywhere close to WoW in popularity, but that may be partially because it was released over a year before WoW was. Galaxies was set during the reign of the Galactic Empire (from the movies), so I think it had less room to work with because of that. It also wasn't made by as good a company as Bioware. I've seen posts from quite a few people that liked Galaxies, and actually the primary thing that killed it off was a controversial patch that made it more like WoW. In other words, they saw WoW's success and tried to copy it, essentially giving people a game that was little more than a WoW clone. From what I've seen posted by others, Galaxies might have actually been more successful if they had stuck with their original style rather than trying to copy WoW.
TOR, on the other hand, has the opportunity to learn from WoW's success in advance rather than trying to throw things together in a patch. TOR also has a better developer and more room to work because of the setting. Saying that TOR will not be as good as WoW because Galaxies was not is an unfair generalization because of how long ago Galaxies was made and the circumstances it was under.