What is a Elite earth like world going to look like?
I assume you mean "What is an Elite Earth-like world going to look like up close, when we can land on them?". Because we already know what Earth-like worlds look like in Elite.
ED has an unusual approach to "alien-ness", primarily because the ED galaxy is so big. Hand-crafted weirdness, like some of the planets featured in various sci-fi franchises and authors, is out of the question (for the record, I'd vote Cordwainer Smith as best "creator of fantastic yet believable alien planets"). So, what do we see in Earth-likes in ED? Here's a montage I prepared earlier...
So, to generate the planets, we've basically got a fractal map-maker drawing the coastline, governed by basic stats for land-water ratio and icecap size. Weather patterns are largely determined by atmosphere thickness. It's the kind of thing you need for procedurally-generated planets - a procedure to generate their appearance. Coloration is fairly consistent; blue oceans, with green-and-tan-coloured landmasses. Any colour differences in the planets in the picture above are entirely caused by the different coloured light of the system's star. So ED is fairly conservative in it s estimation of what an "Earth-like planet" would look like from space - it sticks to "known science". So there won't be any cyan-colured grass, or red oceans, or green skies, because there's no known scientific explanation of how such things could come about. Not on a planet with human-breathable air, at any rate; if you want that kind of thing, go land on an Ammonia World.
This means that many of the ELW planets will indeed look "samey" up close, just as they all tend to look "samey" from space, as the procedures that generate them cannot allow for too much variation, lest the edge-cases of the procedure look completely cartoonish or otherwise ridiculous; they will want to make the algorithms such that an "average" planet looks realistic, from a currently-known-science point of view.
Does this mean that there won't be any weird, inexplicable surface features on Earth-like planets? Absolutely not. As we've seen with other aspects of the Stellar Forge, truly weird and improbable things will almost certainly happen, given enough dice-rolls. Glowing Green GIants were almost certainly not in the original intent of the Stellar Forge's creators, for example. But their improbability means that very, very few of the planets we will find will show them.