It's this last quote that is at the heart of it all:

"Any micro-transaction that has a game effect can also be earned in the game through play."

Using WoW terms, will it be equivalent to green items, blue items or maybe even tiered raid gear that you can buy with cryptic dollars. If it's anything close to the latter, I fear it hard to convince people to play a game that so obviously is more expensive than the competition. Yeah you can earn it ingame but if it takes hours upon hours of work to do so the cash users will obviously be superior.