The publishing possibilities shown in the new communication sites serve a great insight of possibilities to create content in SharePoint. While this is an suitable approach for user generated content such as in Wikis there is a high demand to provide a consistent corporate wide communication.
In the past this was possible through page layout option which is now missing and removes the ability for corporate communication departments to manage, plan and organise the content to communicate.
In addition the missing page layout option lead to inconsistent and at least time consuming page creation. It will be hard to recreate the same page again because all asset types and content elements needs to be placed in the exact same order on the new page.From previous project mostly two to three page layout where enough to provide an efficient way to create and orchestrate content creation with enough flexibility. The current page variant selection is not an appropriate equivalent.

The current communication site template cannot be used for corporate wide communication because there are some important things missing.
The overall design is only able to speak and represent only the Microsofot CI/CD. The missing branding and theming options makes it hard to be used in corporates because there is currently no way to apply corporate communication and design guidelines to the page. For user it makes it hard to identify the page as an official communication channel by the company and not by Microsoft.

In addition not even well known and supported customisations through Themes is possible at the moment to change the look and feel. Changes in themes does not reflect in the communication site at all.

Overall it is hard to sell the communication site to marketing and CEO from a customer prespective. Right now the only valid option to establish communication channels at customers is through the classical publishing features (with not such a fancy page creation) or through classical blogs.

As there is no variations feature anymore and obviuosly Microsoft isn´t investing in this feature for communications sites it would be pretty helpful to have bing translator integrated to a News page or normal page inside communication sites. We as a large coopertaion have to meet legal requirements providing multiple languages for an Intranet. Its just ´so much effort and not really efficient to create for each language an own communication site and link in between. This is as well nor really ideal for Editors of articles who have to publish their News multiple times in various communication site with the same Content but just in another language.

The flexibility of page creation mostly will overwelm business users and is definitly not markting and communications departments like to have. There goal is to provide fast and effiecent information. Right not the community portal lacks of two things:
1) Consistency - Any user can create any layout and it will be hard, time consuming and inefficient to create a consitent layout
2) Missing metadata for further filtering and content categorisation
3) No branding options to speak the tone and voice of the companyThis is the most challenging piece of inconsitent communication because it doesn't allow to speak the voice and tone of the customer it is only a well crafted application in Office 365.
Because of the last bullet point here customer already search for alternative intranets and communication medias to represent the corporate CI/CD Guidelines and go back to tools such as Wordpress. This is the most worring part because SharePoint in the past was always a good intranet content management system. Improvable but working.The first step to fix these issues will be to have custom page templates that allows to create new content structured fast and efficient with fixed content block. Metadata to categorize content and avoid to have multiple comminucations sites that user need to look up.
Finally branding made SharePoint huge and was always a great selling point to marketing, beside the collaboration aspect, ECM and other aspects. Right now it feels like writing a corporate word document and be only allowed to use the default template with only the ability to add a custom logo.