The screens do not look impressive but the feature list does.

When the tool-set is great then artists will jump on it very fast especially when the non-commercial version is for free.
You see the same with Beyond Virtual. It has a fantastic art-pipeline and you see constantly new screen-shots in their forum and most of them look really good.

If this really works (all those post processing effects, normal- and parallax-shaders, soft-shadows, in-game editors, real-time shader editor and much more) then this tool-set will be a very powerful set and new shots will come very fast.

Visual3d.NET claims to support obj, 3ds, fbx, collada and x. So everybody can import meshes into this engine.

They build the engine consequently around the DX9 graphic cards and support only Shader 2.0 and higher. But every lighting is modern and shader based. They even said that they will support DX10 as well.

The terrain is huge. I have no idea what kind of scene-management they do.

They hire people and pay real money so I think the engine will not be very cheap. But I have no idea how much it will be at the end.