So are you indicating that all planets will be entirely different, with different surface features, etc (ie. Canyon where there was once a mountain?) or just their coloration and lighting? It would be uncool if darwins legacy Basecamp was entirely a different place than it is now.
What is even more interesting is how the surfaces will change once q4 is released. How will they reconcile existing topography with new surface textures and features....
As far as I can tell this pass will only be colouring and texturing, that is changing colours depending on vulcanism and mineral content, so iron rich planets will probably be a redder tone, rocky without much metal will be darker grey and etc through all the different combinations. You should be able to tell what the planet is made of and where minerals are concentrated just by looking at them, even vulcanism which will indeed be a big change and maybe will help us find vulcanism on some of the larger bodies.
Later in Beyond we are getting improvements to the surface, such as better object scattering, more varied objects and surface texture changes, but I haven't yet seen anything to tell me they are going to change the heightmaps that generate the actual landscape, this would be difficult at the moment and pretty much pointless unless they were introducing major changes such as a new surface generation method that included support for overhangs, caves and other such varied topographic features not supported by plain height maps.
They changed some features previously to get rid of anomalous features such as the 30km deep vertical walled crater but I suspect that was simply a pass to tidy up problems in the height map generation, just chopping off the extreme ends of the generated numbers which would simply be the addition of an algorithm to detect when height map number wandered to far from the average and to limit it. The actual landscape would have still had the same general shape, just not the extreme depressions and ridges we used to see. So most things should stay the same, but they should look a lot different.
Beaten by Orvidius!