Can anyone translate what the restrictions actually mean so that those of us who haven't declined can understand them?
What does being limited to one race do? AFAIK all of the races before were just humans with a different skin tint?
For new people, nothing. For people who bought the game and played it, their existing characters are frozen unless they fork up cash. For example, my l50 IA and Sith Warrior wouldn't be playable if I suddenly decided to go back to the game unless I paid up.
What does being limited to speeder rank 1 do? Are speeders useful or is this just an extra 5 mins to get from A to B?
Speeder rank 2/3 are slightly faster (we're talking a 10-20% speed increase IIRC). The main draw to a higher level speeder is that if you drive past a monster on a rank 1 speeder and it attacks you, you get knocked out of travel mode and fall off. Rank 2/3 speeders allow you to zip past lower-level enemies. It's a minor convenience at best.
What the fuck is a flashpoint?
Instanced dungeons a la WoW 5-mans. Most of them are pretty fun. The first one is also a very popular farm spot for people looking to grind affection with their first companion. (Affection gives some dialogues and a quest for more xp but more importantly increases the speed they do crafting missions at for you).
Does anyone need a bank with a million credits? If this was Diablo 2 I would just laugh because gold was useless there.
I recall dropping 250k cred on a speeder rank upgrade. It's not a huge issue at first, but once you hit lv 30+ you'll probably want to be able to store at least half a million creds. Several million on your main also means you can skip a lot of grind on your alts and just mail yourself some gold. Once you hit level 30+, finding useful gear on the AH for less than 100k becomes problematic. Especially if you're looking for purple upgrades for your orange gear since you can't craft those yourself.
What is crafting good for? Isn't the best shit in these MMOs always rare drops from boss mobs anyway?
In TOR, the best stuff drops from Operations (raids) at lv50. Up until then, the best stuff you will get is a set of Orange gear. Oranges come with a number of upgrade slots, allowing you to upgrade the same chestpiece as you level up to remain useful. Purple upgrades of your level are the best (or close enough as makes no difference) until you hit the endgame. All upgrades are made via crafting, or you can pay an exorbitant amount of commendations for blue ones. Or you can buy them via the auction house, but you're definately not going to get a lot of upgrades ofr a high level character with just 100k in the bank.
Of course, oranges are usually gotten from crafting (you can't do that), flashpoints (you can't enter those), the auction house (you probably can't afford those) or a few story missions. Some commendation vendors sell them as well. That's probably where you're going to get the most of them from.