Glossy finish is a good thing for me, as I love regularly taking care of my stuff to keep it clean.
The optical drive flex is awkward, but I have had the same problem with other laptops in the past and it didn't affect anything.
The battery is decent for my purposes, it's about what I get with my ASUS Eee PC currently.
The heat is awkward but rather than spending an extra $200 for the ASUS RoG machine I would spend $20-$40 on a good quality laptop cooling mat. I only game when the laptop is stationary anyway, because I use a mouse.
Weight is good, it's actually slightly lighter than my wife's 15" Acer Travelmate from 5 years ago despite having 10x the performance.
I won't be using the trackpad unless I'm just browsing the Internet while it's on battery power. I will be using the Razer DeathAdder most of the time as a trackpad in general is the worst input for RTS gaming.
Noise could be better, I don't like a lot of noise. The turbo fan option is useless to me. I think the noise is about the same as what I'm used to, though, so I won't be taking a loss.
Lack of a backlit keyboard is kinda disappointing, meh. At least the quality of the keyboard is above average (SteelSeries). Maybe I will get an accessory LED-backlit keyboard some day.
You can use a laptop configuration site to configure this with a 60GB mSATA SSD plus a junk HDD, so I am not fussed about what drive comes on it by default.
I think this is the best $1000-$1100 laptop I have found for my needs. I will buy it as soon as I can save up enough $.