I hope people don't get confused about the meaning of "instanced" here. It's not like we'll be separated by channels or the world will be devoid of other players. It just means there won't be a need for transitions between different types of terrain. The world will still be persistent. I just want to clarify (at least that's how I understand it)
And if you think about it, right now we have a character limit, which is why you see so many people popping in and out of invisibility in Ul'dah regardless of distance. Right now, we have parts of the map loaded that we never even see. If those parts are minimized, this would allow for a higher character count, meaning more crowded looking cities, larger drawing distance for mobs, PCs, and NPCs, and we'd probably barely see a difference.
Just think about all of those bottlenecks between "areas" we have right now. That point when all you see is 2 walls on each side of you, add in a 10 second loading screen and you'll never see people randomly popping out of nowhere like we do now, because we have a huge map loaded that we aren't even in.
Those bottlenecks are practically loading screens, except we have to hold w instead of stare at a blank screen.
