Well I'll tell ya. I've recently played the Empire at War demo. My feelings? If I just had $40/45/50 to spend on one game, I'd go for GalCiv2. Why? I'm not a RTS person. Which is not to say that EAW is not a cool game. Quite the opposite. It's one of the first RTS games that I've enjoyed for a while. It seems (by the demo) to have toned down the crap that turns me off to RTS games. There is one, and only one commodity. Money. You get that from owning planets. Nice, says I.
The controls are pretty easy to learn and the graphics are state of the art. Will I buy it? I dunno, maybe. In the future, perhaps. But I recently preordered GalCiv2 and expect my gametime to be wrapped up in that.
And of course Master of Magic on my laptop.
EAW looks good but my first love is TBS. Her name is Galactic Civilizations 2.