Did you get a feeling that there are more tiles with hexes than old squares?
It feels like there's more space, but I think that's because they increased the number of tiles per world size, not because of the change to hexes. After hearing about units all having a base two movement, I expected them to have doubled the the number of tiles to keep the same relative scale; I haven't actually counted the number of tiles though.
Also, city spam feels reduced a bit, so there is more empty space during mid-game as well.