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Thanks for your interest; I'll try and answer your questions the best I can.
Complexity, in terms of how the rules go, I think it's slightly more complex. Units can become suppressed and pinned, which is a major part of the game's strategy.
Instead of a given model shooting and hitting based on his personal statistic alone, it's a combination of quality, volume of fire and the cover level the enemy is in. There are no buckets of dice; every squad rolls 2d6 and adds bonuses based on how many there are, the presence of machine guns, etc to get a score which is divided by the opponents cover level to determine how many enemy models are hit.
The game is not I Go U Go, but alternating activations.
Troops come in 4 quality levels: Rabble, which is like guys literally just given guns; Conscript, which is supposed to represent your average "just finished basic" style trooper; Regular, which is superior trained or seasoned troops; and Elite, which is Elite. Quality gives you bonuses to fire, to morale, and gives you a number of inches that dictate "point blank range" and how far apart the models can be when moving. This ranges from 2" at Rabble to 5" at Elite or 6" if you have power armor.
This "basic range" is multiplied by the weapon your trooper has; no weapon has a set range. F.E. a "Low Tech Rifle" like a Kar 98k or an M1 Garand multiplies your base range by x5. In the hands of a "regular" (4" base range), this gives you short range, or 20". This is doubled to 40" to find medium range, and tripled to 60" to find long range. Weapons are rather long ranged in this game; it's all about the cover.
There's a system for customizing your troops, giving them weapons, equipment and quality and then deriving a point value from it; there's also a system to settle that by rolling randomly. This is what turns most of my friends off to the game; 40k has a system where everything is given, requiring no real effort on their part.
Vehicles were kind of tacked on at the last moment a few editions ago, and the current edition under works seeks to upgrade it. It allows in it's current state battles between whole tank units, completely devoid of infantry, if the players wish it. It's ok in this edition, but the next edition is supposed to offer more flexibility in design in addition to fixing some rule issues. The "typical" game is really supposed to be vehicle light for the most part, though there are some nice
A game equal to 1500 points of 40k could take 10 minutes to two hours or more; it really depends. Units can die fast if you just leave them out in the open to get slaughtered. They can also stay at far ranges and dig into cover and be difficult to remove. On the whole I suppose it would take about a half hour if both players are on the move. I haven't done 1.5k point games in 40k I'm afraid :/
Hope this helped!
M.
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