What changes the most is not the story structure but the voice of the narrator. Calling the White Tower the metaphor, Tar Valon a workaday capital... those things don't gel with the voice RJ had as a narrator.
If nothing else, this will make us appreciate how much of our appreciation for the feel and atmosphere of Randland was because of RJ's supposedly unnecessary descriptions. Brandon describes a lot, maybe as much as RJ, but fails to have some coherence, IMO, which indicates that this is one connected world he is talking about.
To put it simply, where before I could imagine that the narrator was intimately aware of the world he described, he now seems like a tourist from our world, using our lingo to describe the WoT world. He says that the Rebel Amyrlin Egwene al'Vere was captive, when describing the thought process of the Rebel Aes Sedai in general. Would they not have thought that the Amyrlin was captive, as they did in the first chapter of the previous book?
For the first time, I am aware of the narrator as distinct from the setting and the story, and that will take time to get used to.