Personally, I really enjoyed the first issue. I tried to come into it with a fresh perspective. It's not the old Alpha, and it may never be. As it stands, it's a new comic with an old favorite that I thought was a refreshing read. I'm looking forward to #2.
I'm still of the mind that Lobdell is going to do something dastardly at the end of this arc. I think that he either created a red herring by saying that he wants to do a spin-off, and is planning on sacrificing the original team for the new one OR the new one is going to be sacrificed, which would be a total shocker. The last time a shocking death of that magnitude occurred was in AF #12. Who would think after setting up the new team, that they would all die to be replaced by the originals?
I may be way off base, but I guess it comes from reading comics and seeing movies with "twist" endings. There's only so may things that you could do that has never been done in a comic before so I'm really reaching for new endings...