I personally don't like a lot of vehicular combat in my RP sessions - not a lot of combat at all, in fact - but I still find ATOW to be a good system. I've spent most of my time in d20 and AD&D 2e, but MW3 / ATOW are a nice change because the 2dX bell curve evens out the wild results.
I also like how it imitates BT's roll against a static TN, with modifiers applying to the roll (and most modifiers being obvious or explicitly stated in the rules). It takes a lot of burden off me as GM. I no longer have to develop a basically arbitrary DC for a skill and feel like crap when it winds up turning into a festival of sucky rolls against a suddenly impossible-to-hit benchmark, which is what happens in d20. Sure, you can look up the tables for every specific skill (what's the recommended DC for a Notice check through a 2" wooden door for a group of whispering orcs located 12' from the door in an octagonal room?), but that's awfully tedious compared to ATOW's flat all-day-every-day TN. Yes, d20 works most of the time. So do MW3 / ATOW.
Personal combat looks simple enough, but I run combat much more rarely in a modern/sci-fi game than I do in fantasy. I have a feeling it'll feel clunky at first in ATOW (if it ever comes up in this campaign in the first place).
MW3 / ATOW also have reasonable expectations with regards to skill advancement. Characters start out great at a few things, good at several things, and acquainted with several things. The default is an achingly slow crawl toward advancement of anything but the earliest skill ranks (it's much simpler to increase the XP handout than to scale back what the book recommends - the latter makes for hurt feelings).
Creating a character isn't as onerous as it appears, especially since ATOW got rid of MW3's attribute thresholds. What I normally do is use one sheet of paper for chargen and another as the character sheet. I record attribute increases / decreases capitalized, traits underlined, and skills normally. When I've finished going through the paths, I draw a line under everything (or, more likely, flip over to the back of the sheet) to denote a space to start adding everything up. I pick the first item I recorded on the front (usually a BOD modifier or something) and note the XP. I go through every stage and cross out where that item appears in that stage, adding the XP to the running total. When I get to the end, I go to my add-up space and record the total. I use one column for attributes, another for traits, and a third for skills. Attributes and traits go pretty quickly. Skills are a little slower on your first character because of the chart which converts XP put into a skill to the actual skill bonus, but by the end of that first character you'll basically have the relevant portion of the chart memorized since basically every character has skills ranging from +0 to +4.
It actually goes much quicker than that explanation. In the time I took to type that up, i could have basically created a character - the biggest time drag would be me staring at the ceiling and stroking my chin as I decide on a character concept and match the concept to a path (or pick skills and traits arbitrarily to match the concept).
I would (and have) play MW3 for a non-BT modern game. ATOW only improves on that system.