It took me a long time to warm up to it, but it's a really good game. What surprises me is that I can actually play it on "Nightmare" mode, something which was never possible before. (Secondly, for the first time ever I think, I freakin' found an Easter Egg by myself without any external reference beforehand! Whoah!) The Nightmare mode seems to mean that YOU take much more damage but enemies still seem to go down with a lesser increase in difficulty. Wingsticks still take just about everybody out. If you needed 3 wingstick hits to take down a mutant for example, that would suck.
There are a lot of nice little animation touches; the sad robot hand, Kavassir's shoulder robo-parrot, and I really loved the "pick up that can" bit, that was a hoot. There's so much lifted from\homage to other games in this, but in a good way. There really should be a special room in all these sorts of games with a shrine to director George Miller. Correct me if I'm wrong, but all this flowed from him.
Overall I still think Borderlands is my favorite, but what is really awesome in RAGE is how the enemies react and interact with the environment. It's pretty impressive stuff. In RAGE you have to bust your ass off to earn money, whereas in Borderlands money quickly becomes useless. Some balance in between would be ideal. You hardly ever get ammo-starved in Borderlands, but in RAGE it happens a lot.