PvP related questions - Honor, Gear, Factions

Hey everyone!

With huge thanks to the developers and the friendly folks around ingame, I would like to ask a few purely PvP related questions on Icecrown:

1) Is honor affected by x7 exp on Icecrown? How long does it take to gather, say, 50,000 honor points? Is is the same as on retail?

2) Is PvP scene active at level 80? Is AV taking place without long queues?

3) Do I have to invest in epic PvP gear to have fun? Is everybody running around in BG's dressed in purple? Would I get destroyed in BG's wearing rare-epic gear? Shall I consider buying gear from shop?

4) Is horde or alliance dominant in BG's? Or are they more or less equal?

Thank you so much! And best luck to everybody.

1) No. 50k honor points, doing random bgs... one or two days.
2) Yes, and if you queue both av and ioc you will get queues very often (well, depends on the time of the day)
3) Yes to all except the last one which depends on you.
4) It's balanced except in av/ioc where alliance dominates.

Yes PVP battlegrounds are active but if you want to get high rating in arenas you better be a hell of a good player because it's inundated with scripters, hackers, and win/loss traders with other top level players on Blackrock. If you just want to do BG's then it's fine, but if your goal is to get high ranking in arenas, be prepared to gruel through hell for months dealing with hackers.