I don't think Loadouts will be as bad as Psy thinks though they will be difficult to get the hand off, and give a better chance to spawn killed people (we all know how hard it can be to recover when the enemy have you pinned in the spawn)

to quote the article about it:

Quote Originally Posted by bungie
Load Outs. At the beginning of each match or round, and again every time you wait out your respawn window, you are given the option of choosing a Load Out.


Load Outs are not player created or defined, but rather playlist and/or game type specific. Essentially, they allow you to choose your Armor Ability, your starting primary and secondary weapons, and your grenade cache on the fly.

For some playlists, that might mean every Load Out features the same weapon sets with only the Armor Abilities to distinguish them. For others, it might mean that as the game goes on, you’ll have access to more and more choices based on a number of factors we can fiddle with.

That's just one example to the right. Many gametypes will feature more uniformity in the initial selection.

What it doesn’t mean is that you will be creating your own custom Load Out to bring into Matchmaking. You’ll be choosing from our prefabricated offerings, based on what’s best suited for each gametype.

Don’t worry about power weapons being available right from the start, either. In most cases, you’ll still be finding those distributed via a number of methods throughout the battlefield, though if circumstance warrants it, we certainly can start you with, say, the Rocket Launcher.

And, of course, you can still loot the corpses of your fallen foes and you’ll still find sweet stashes of weapons strewn carelessly about the map for you to find and acquire.
So yeah it's going to be game speciffic no MW2 loadouts but yeah aside from the lack of MW2 loadout it's pretty much what I expected of Halo Reach when they said Loadouts in the trailer.

heres an image to better accompany it:



For the short version basically each game is going to start with a screen like the above image, in that screen you'll select from some preset weapon and armour ability loadouts to fight against your enemies with.

Also of note:

Quote Originally Posted by Bungie
Embracing Our DifferencesLast week we trotted Luke Smith and friends out to talk at some length about the economy of Credits and how they, coupled with Military Rank, will ultimately inform the visual accouterments adopted by your Spartan avatar in Halo: Reach. This week, we decided to get a little more technical and dive into the more matérielistic side of the multiplayer coin. We’ll dig in even further in just a few, but since the two subjects do intertwine somewhat, I figured we’d begin where the two roads meet.

That brings us to Elites. We’ve already said that the Elites found in Halo: Reach were never meant to conform to the noble notion of equality. For far too long, our Sangheili brothers have been leashed – their very backs burdened by the weight of multiplayer parity. They hunched, bent to the whims of human anatomy.

/LARP


Not anymore. In Reach, Elites are bigger, they’re faster, and they boast better shield technology than their Spartan counterparts. To drive the first point home – the size difference — we’ve prepped a side-by-side comparison so you can see just how pronounced the physical changes really are. Click it to check it out in higher resolution.

Size matters. And when we say Elites are faster, we mean it. Natively, Elites are about as fast as a Spartan at full Sprint. Add Evade into the mix, and they’re easily the most agile combatants on the battlefield in multiplayer.

Unlike Spartans, their health is not limited to recharging in thirds as their vitality is whittled away in stages, but will recharge fully without even the need for a health pack. Their health also recharges faster, as do their shields. Significantly faster.

So, how are we gonna work them into multiplayer? Well, in a number of ways. In some circumstances, like Arena, you’ll only square off Spartan vs. Spartan or Elite vs. Elite. In others, well…stay tuned.

We’ll dig into some interesting scenarios in the weeks ahead.
Looks like elites could be beastly to play against. They've ruled out them fighting spartans in ranked mode but in matchmaking that might be another story...could if done right be amazing.