The birds look to be inspired by FligthGear
Watching many of the previews available from beta testers I felt like there were a lot of similarities to FG. I got the impression that many of the new highlighted features were features FG has already in some form introduced, even if only at the proof of concept level. Scenery being the exception, but only because they can leverage Bing and have billions of $ to invest. I felt like the reviews were focusing on features we take for granted in FG but are always highlighting when we compare FG to any other sim.
Even with all the features MSFS added, it falls short of the overall capabilities of FG. The list of FG capability is truly mind numbing when you try to list everything that can and has been done with it. With the biggest difference that FG is usually only one person or a small group tackling any individual feature or capability. Just think if in all this time we had the budget of MSFS. I've yet to see if they can land on water, can they? Do they have a float plane yet, no helicopters yet. Their list of 40ish aircraft pale in comparison to the list in FG. When will you see a Shuttle and Earth View, fire breathing dragons, HPA's Dirigibles, parachutists, gliders, UAV's, quad copters, cargo towing, forest fires and the ability to tanker or water drop them to extinction, carrier operations, weapon systems, ground vehicles you can drive, the networking schemes FG has available, volcanoes, etc., etc., I could go on. They do have rainbows, that is one of those features that feels like they were trying to take a page out of the FG playbook.
But with all that said, I am still really interested in it. The scenery is stunning when customized, nice enough when not and accurate to the real world. The clouds and weather look to be realistic and very well done from what I have seen and the FDM is supposed to be of a caliber worthy of the price tag. We'll see once many people really start looking under the hood.