Already tried it in beta, didn't like it that much. Got bored after a week or so, as I'd rather play Dota and LoL.
I played it for a couple of weeks, I didn't quite like it.

Notable differences with Dota:

- Experience is shared
- There's no currency
- There are no items. It's all about your ability build.
- There's no creep deny
- There are many maps with different objectives.
- You can't win without properly managing the objectives of the map you're playing.
Same here, I've played the beta for about 20 games or so.

xterm already noted the main differences betwen HotS and Dota/LoL, here are a few to add:
  • Games are considerably shorter
  • You need to buy heroes (with a periodic rotation of free ones), similarly to LoL
  • It inherits from the Blizzard lore. If you play Diablo/Starcraft/(World of )Warcraft, you'll meet familiar characters.
  • Better tutorial, and overall single player experience
- You can't win without properly managing the objectives of the map you're playing.
This should be the case in Dota too :P
well you can't win without taking the ancient in dota so that's your objective
@ballad, you're right, my comment was slightly more subtle. At low levels, most players would spend too much time farming in lane/jungle instead of actually focusing on objectives (towers + Roshan), causing games to drag on infinitely. Me and xterm often complain about this, so it's kind of a running joke between us.

HotS puts a lot more emphasis on map objectives by severely tipping the balance towards the team that gets them correctly.
dota is highly dependant on the meta, some metas are for pushing early and some others are for ricing and farming a carry for 40 minutes.
My point is that dota finds a perfect balance between playing the objective and playing to outfarm your enemy.
Note that i played in the 5K mmr bracket for a long time
I wasn't talking about the obvious main objective which is kill the enemy's base. I'm talking about the Map specific ones.

See here for more info: http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/battlegrounds/

They give you a MASSIVE advantage. (You'd surely lose without them)
Dota has such events like diretide and greeveling and others, but their replayability is limited.
Dota is famous because it's simple and it already requires tons of time to become good at it, and each game mode is considered a challenge by itself that's why I think that having those different game mods is a turn-off.
Please understand what I'm saying. I did not say HotS is better than Dota because of the different maps. I've already made it clear that I did not like the game; What i did say is that you cannot win a game without abusing the map mechanics. As an example:

If you collect coins in the pirate map, you can bomb the enemies' towers and eventually base; If you ignore this mechanic, you lose. If you're playing HotS as if you're playing dota, you'd be demolished by the team that is engaging in the battleground specific mechanics.

This is what differentiates HotS from Dota.