Of course, what a guitar should sound like is entirely subjective, but my initial impression is that it's pretty good. Maybe even pretty darn good.
First issue is playability. It needs to be built *extremely* precisely to play in tune. I seem to have cleared that hurdle. It neck also needs to be at a precise angle to make the action playable, and I seem OK there, too.
Inexplicably though, it seems "stiff" to play, as though it's strung with medium instead of light strings. That's confusing, since the scale length is a half inch *shorter* than the Taylor, so the tension should be less. It could be the action being a little too high still, since I adjusted it conservatively for the first go around, but it seems to be more than that. My only guess is the Martin strings that they included are somehow stiffer than the ones I'm used to, so I'm going to restring it and see what happens.
As far as the sound, the highs are crystalline and sustain forever. It immediately brings to mind a music box, and the high-capoed tinkly songs sound great. The bass is strong, and less brassy than what I'm used to on my Taylor.
Unexpectedly, we got cleared to go play on the street corner in Laguna, although it was cold and gloomy. That suited my fine, as I expected there to be nobody around and a shirt outing, in case the guitar was unsuitable in some way. Turned out, the weather in Laguna was way nicer than at home, and we ended up playing for lots of people for five and a half hours. That gave me the chance to try every kind of song I know -- soft quiet fingerpicked ones, hard strummed fast ones, and everything in between. And, I have to say, they all sounded good.
Now, obviously, the sound through the pickup and an amplifier is different than the sound acoustically. And the biggest surprise (though in retrospect it shouldn't have been) is that, since this pickup doesn't feed back on the bass notes like my Taylor notoriously does, I was able to play with a lot more bass included, making the biggest difference between the two. Now, in most cases, the extra bass was terrific, but sometimes it would obscure treble riffs that I'm used to hearing -- though clearly those riffs were only so obvious on the Taylor because of the lack of bass.
So, despite hoping that it would "sound like the Taylor", it doesn't, though maybe that's a good thing. Or maybe I'm subliminally obliged to like it more than it deserves because of all the effort I put into it. On the other hand, can you imagine going into a guitar store that only had one guitar hanging on the wall? What are the odds that that guitar is The One For You? I played dozens of guitars before choosing the Taylor model I got.
Of course, I can fall back on the Taylor, and this can make a pretty wall hanging, but time (and different strings) will tell. When the novelty wears off, I'm sure it'll be apparent which one I'd rather reach for.
