The Stair of Destiny

On the Blasted Lands side of the Dark Portal, the crater area has been cleared out of high-level mobs, and quest-giving NPCs have been added instead. This begins a series of quest breadcrumbs that lead you through the Dark Portal, into Outland, and to the first major city where you can start loading up on quests.

The mobs that once patrolled the Dark Portal have been removed.
On the Outland side of the portal is The Stair of Destiny, which contains some impressive sights, including a never-ending battle between the combined forces of the Alliance and Horde and all manner of giant level 70 demons. It's easy to be fooled into thinking that the fight is fully scripted and you're not in any danger, but get too close to the giant fel guards and they will pummel you into the ground. Quickly.

Unsurprisingly, these level 70 elite demons resisted everything I shot at them. Probably for the best.
Thankfully, the quest trail leads to a gryph master on the stairs, who (for the Alliance side) offers to fly you to Honor Hold, the Alliance city towards the middle of the zone. Without much else to do at the Portal, we took our gryph and we were off.

Honor (on) Hold

As soon as I landed at Honor Hold, I realized I'd forgotten something important: at the start of the beta, all characters had had their talents wiped clean, so I had to relearn them at a class trainer. Since there weren't any trainers at Honor Hold, I set that to be my hearth location and teleported back to Stormwind to train. (I knew I picked the mage for a reason.)

Mages will have the option of having a water elemental "pet," who will fight at your side for short stretches.
Retraining gave me a chance to look at the new, expanded mage talent tree. Although Muggy's a fire-specced mage, his gear is pretty neutral, which made this a perfect chance to try out the frost tree and the new water elemental summon you get at the bottom of the Frost tree (basically, it's a mage pet you can summon for 45 seconds every 3 minutes).

The new character panel allows you to view different sets of stats.
While retraining, I also took a look at the new character panel implemented in the beta, which has a few cool new features and some interesting changes to the way stats are displayed. To start, there's a little drop-down box where you can see detailed information on your melee, ranged and spell stats, and the way crit% and hit% are displayed have also been changed to a rating that will scale as you go up in level (which has been the subject of much debate in general chat.)