For reference, I have mage that is pretty much decked out in s2/s3/honor pvp gear that just recently got in the beta.

The first piece of quest gear I saw for me (dps caster) was a cloak. It was hands down worse than my cloak, but not too far off.

The next thing I found was a blue dagger that, paired with an equivalently good offhand would have been a definite pve upgrade to my s2 staff. This was within about 1 hr of zoning into Northrend, btw.

My take is that you're going for find upgrades pretty fast, first 3-4 levels or so on average. This reminds me very much of BC, and made me realize decide to totally forget gearing up any of my chars at this point and just work on getting chars/teams to 70, instead.