oh these days... All it takes to be called a "WOW clone" is you need a game with abilities, level ups, quests, classes, and online players and poof you got a wowclone. have a game with an elf in it and online its suddenly a wow coppy cat.
Its much saying that call of duty and halo are quake clones.
You can't reinvent the wheel, and yet so far the only mmorpg that is not a "wowclone" is eve-online and thats because its pure pvp combat and sandbox style customizations. There's no "classes" or "one role to play" and every ship (character) is customizable to either be dps, tank, healing, or utility without re-rolling.
Haven't played city of heroes, or matrix online or anything of that sort so can't comment....
I just hope bioware focuses on whats considered long term gameplay, lore cannonization, defining what's endgame and not just "level cap pwnage", and how to appeal to the occasional farmer, pvper, 1 hour a day player as well as hardcore 8 hours a day grindage uber pwnage.
P.S.
most importantly making the game balanced. Not uber faceroll mages, constant tweaking of 5%, 10%, 7% 15% 2% with added effect against pvp targets only for abilities every single content patch. or re-structuring classes, re-mapping entire classes, re-working talent trees, breaking, fixing, breaking fixing, making live your beta-test, and most importantly having 90% of the server being 1 particular class (jedi) because they are so OP and refuse to balance out the other classes.