PvP in WoW is a joke compared to AH. Way to much "I win because I have good gear or am such and such class to the class you are." to really be as skill based.
That said, in vanilla WoW, something like only 2% of the players ever saw the second raid (Black Wing Lair) cleared and on many servers, mine included, the fourth raid was never cleared before the first expansion came out. PvE can be quite a bit harder than PvP in those games.
PVE was the fun for me. I agree about the gear thing - I always considered a game like Aces High to be a meritocracy while a game like WoW is, at heart, a geritocracy.
In Aces High, anybody can beat anybody if they have the talent. Nothing prevents someone from becoming exceptional in a short time and besting the best of the best at their own games. WoW put up artificial barriers in terms of gear and time sinks (dailies/weekly raid lockouts/etc). You could play your class exceptionally well, and you still couldn't compare in PVP or PVE without gearing up.
That said, I did find the PVE element of WoW intriguing because of the organization and leadership it required. Was it AH hard? No, of course not, but it was entertaining enough to keep me happy for a number of years. WoW is easy to learn but hard to master; AH is hard to learn and basically impossible to master.
