Oh, I love BG as much as anyone, in fact the only reason I don't play it anymore is that I practically know it by heart now. I just think the whole exploration part of it wasn't very well done or engaging. To me, the best bits about BG were the more focused, tight parts of it. That's one of the reasons why I love BG2 so much, actually. They kind of the ditched the exploration parts but made other areas a lot fuller.
I guess that, in a way, Bioware accomplished the kind of transition between BG and BG2 that Bethesda tried to do from Daggerfall to Morrowind and failed.