The primary points are:

1) Everything uses 3d6 (EVERYONE has six siders, so no spending $5 on dice),

2) characters are (ideally) built, not rolled, with no classes or hit points

3) there are only four stats, with the (many) skills based on DX or IQ and

4) it's truly generic; virtually any kind of gameworld is possible, from cavemen to Star Wars, all using the same rules.

The other nice thing was that most of the nontechnical skills had defaults for being untrained, often to other skills. The textbook example (literally) was broadsword and shortsword, Physical Average skills that both defaulted to DX-5, but also defaulted to each other at broad/shortsword-2. So if you had an 18 broadsword skill you also had a 16 shortsword skill (or vice versa) despite only having studied one of them, and untrained in either a 15 DX still allowed you to use both with a decent skill level of 9 (your parry would suck though; since it was half your skill you'd need to roll a 4 on 3d6). It was NOT combat intensive; HT took the place of hit points and since it was a stat like any other you couldn't increase it much, making combat an always dangerous proposition (kinda like in real life, which was the point).

Sounds like I need to put a link up there; consider it done.