In the 2008 fanfest, the chief technology officer Halldor Fannar gave a talk on visual computing at CCP Games. He and a guy from Nvidia discussed the plans for updating the game's visual effects and then planets. The visual effects are done and they're working on the planets now. In the talk, they discussed the possibility of using a fractal based approach to procedurally generate the planetary details.

That would let them add more detail dynamically depending on zoom level, so that people could get much closer to planets than before without resolution problems. That's something you can't realy do with just plain textured spheres, even with high definition textures. And then CCP Chronitis just posted on the forums that they are indeed moving warp-in points and stations closer to the planets ( http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1181371&page=1#10 ).

I seriously hope they stuck with the procedural generation idea and certainly the terrain they have on those planets looks like it was generated with 1/f fractal noise. So it's looking promising.