Nintendo rarely frontloads their games like that. Remember the Super Mario 3D World reveal? They showed some of the first few levels and it looked fairly bland, but then a few months later a new trailer showed much later areas in the game which were incredibly varied and super fun looking. Nintendo typically likes to slowly introduce mechanics to the player and then build upon them as the game goes on adding in complexity when you get to later areas, and this Zelda is likely following that philosophy.
We've seen the plateau area which is about 1.1% of the game's landmass (as was pointed out above), and already in that area we can see a bunch of different types of landscape, foliage, structures, etc. You can be sure there will be a huge variety in settings- we will get our dense forests, our rocky canyons, our vast desert, our snowy peaks, our death mountains, our lake Hylia, and that's before we even mention towns, plural. Bill Trinnen confirmed there are towns in this game, so it won't be just Kakariko village.
So essentially what I'm saying is I would wait before proclaiming this empty and samey, since we've barely seen anything of this game and already it looks rather dense and varied.
Edit:
Also, as someone found in the other thread, one of the translators slips up and mentions "vehicles" during the stream, which makes Bill Trinnen look right at the translator for a second, and then immediately the translator backtracks and says, "like the horse, the horses." I think it's pretty clear we will get other vehicles besides the horse and the raft. Hopefully some really cool and unique things, like maybe a really fast Spinner, or a Beetle we can latch onto, things like that. Or possibly just a Loftwing though that sounds boring to me.
/RagnarokX I'm looking at you! 