I just read this article that says the vice-president of Blizzard thinks TOR will be a good thing for the MMO genre because it'll bring more people into the market.

It's interesting because Bioware owes it's high-budget to WOW. They wouldn't dream of spending as much as they have on TOR if it wasn't for WOW already growing the western market for MMO's from less than 1 million to a multi-million person market. It's kind of like the big players on the market see more quality competition as a good thing, and low-quality games like APB or Warhammer as hurting interest in the genre.