Well, it doesn't really play like either. It is a trading Engine with thousands of AI components moving stuff around. The game is sort of built over and around that trade engine. The gameplay itself has little 'feel' really compared to FS2 or Freelancer, even if it is much much prettier, it's more like 'Eve Online' with lots of flying between gates and checking on prices. The main focus of this game is Trade, theres no getting away from it, combat happens, but the long-term money will mostly come from trade.
Usually, you leave combat up to your autopilot, which is a lot more profficient at it than I, the best thing about X is the fact you can, if you can afford it, buy multiple ships and form them into attack wings. In X2 I had a Battleship, Carrier and two wings of 30 Nova as defence escort, though I usually kept them docked because of Framerate issues. You can automate ships you own through upgrading their computers, so fitting trade upgrades to a hauler can, for example, stop it from buying Ore from the nearest source and start it buying for the best price within 3 stargates etc.
Once you are rich enough, you can even buy factories as kits and deploy them, once they are stocked with resources, they can build stuff to sell. The system is cyclic, so almost every type of factory builds something another type of factory uses.
The graphics, whilst looking great, can be slightly jerky, and the control system is not designed around combat, the menus are very deep, and you jump between ship control and cursor mode by right-clicking, left clicking is shoot in ship-control mode and select in cursor mode, this can lead to confusion
All in all, it's a good game, very pretty, very very slow at first, I recommned you start in easy mode, which gives you a hauler and 100K, though, if you've never played X2 before, expect a steep learning curve.
