I played some real WvW tonight. I've been doing EoTM just to fast grind my way to 500BoH and get my Gift of Mastery... now that I did that I spent time in the borderlands and it works a lot differently.
The timer is 15 minutes for rewards and at maxium participation you get 550pts. So every 15 min you get rewarded as opposed to about every 20 min (138pt every 4 min) on EoTM. I made significantly more progress on my reward track.
Porting between borderlands doesn't reset your participation. This is huge. I ran with a 50 person squad and we skipped between BG and JQ's borderlands after spending a bit of time in EB. Big fights are back, and its amazing. Siege going off, bags falling everywhere, death and destruction surrounding you. WvW is def back and better than ever. My only gripe is that the desert borderlands run as bad as HoT maps. I had to turn down my shaders and other settings because it was like HP rush all over again. Lag spikes are not good when 50v50 zerg clash is going on. I def prefer the alpine BL. The desert BL is really cool looking though.