Ships and other goods are packs to support game creation.
They give you access first to ship before they ship game so you can fuck around with them.
Only first batch of people had lifetime insurance which made their ships permanent.
Out of those most of them have some low level ships as average contribution is 70-80bucks.
Without lifetime insurance effectively anyone can get to you in space and steal ship. So all of your $10k you spend on your ship will go down the drain. So the only way for you to keep your ship is either not play or form corporation that can actually keep it secure.
Imho it is not an issue. MMO will require initial setup of powers much like EVE online. So people form corporations and alliance themselves even before game starts creating such initial setup.
For most of people faction warfare either way will be complete background.
Is it P2W ? no one knows yet. We don't know what CI have in store for release but i doubt they will be killing goose lying golden eggs.
Either way it won't matter much as there will be much more normal players and whales will work good as background to conflicts much like EVE Online.