There's a video about it on Gamespot from the Leipzig convention last month where they show various bits of the game (including how nukes work) while one of the designers talk about it. He said that the ways they went about streamlining it was to make the maps smaller (really smaller from what I could see, about seven tiles away from Rome was the Egyptian capital) and to cut out many of the more obscure techs from the tech tree.
I have to say, I was way more excited about this game before I saw that video. I like the complexity of Civ, I like the speed it goes at and think that it's best the way it is in Civ IV where you can choose the size of your maps and the speed of the game. Forcing small maps and fast games on people just doesn't seem like a good idea.
I'll probably still buy it though, just to keep my Civ collection complete.