I was in beta for a few months, till hubby got his Vanguard beta invite and I got sucked back into VG.
Please bear in mind these impressions are based on my playstyle and playing preferences and your mileage may be very different.
First off, LOTRO is a really, really pretty game. It's much less graphically demanding than VG but still looks great and can be pushed to very decent settings. It's a different art style from Vanguard - if I had to characterise it I'd say it's somewhere between the WoW-cartoony and the VG hyper-realistic. In any case, I found many of the landscapes and models stunning -- the char models were less so, but that seems to be a gripe of mine in almost any game. Also, since I haven't played it in 2 months, that may have changed.
Adventuring play is, or was, very quest-oriented with usually more quests to do than you can handle at a given level. Many are group-oriented but there's plenty of solo content too. They have an interesting take on many of the classes they created. Of note especially is that there is no standard spell-caster as we're used to seeing (unless things have changed significantly) -- the closest you can get is the lore-master, which is also a pet class.
Crafting in LOTRO is, to my style of play, too secondary to be a draw. It is almost identical to the WoW crafting style (pick recipe, enter number to make, sit back, wait), and unless a great deal has changed in the last few months of beta -- which is quite possible! -- it wasn't my cup of tea.
I haven't the time to get into a huge review. My take was that LOTRO wouldn't hold me the way Vanguard was likely to -- that said, it has
plenty to offer people whose playstyle it more closely matches. I'm definitely advising people it's worth a look, even if it wasn't the game for me.