Try the UFO:A? games. They also have a squad of 5 which can be increased to 7, and the maps are a bit bigger than what was in the gameplay video. It is possible, you will probably be losing a few every now and then, especially if your tactics are shitty, but it is possible. Yes, it's not as atrocious as the original was, but I can still remember the times I've spent 30+ mins trying to find the last alien in the terror mission in TFTD, on the island maps. Damn those bunkers...

X-COM lets you to configure individually the movement speed for your own troops, aliens, scrolling and fired shots, so I would guess that the speed in the LP videos was specifically made slow so that newcomers could follow whats is happening and also to give the author time to curse as his aimed shot is off by 30 degrees and is approaching his best troopers backside?

Well, obviously the sales numbers show that a vast majority DO NOT prefer complex games. AND, I would put forth that what you refer to as complex is often fiddly and clunky, while what I refer to as simple is often elegance in design. Chess is simple to teach, you know.

Well, Paradox doesn't really release sale numbers but maybe you wanna look at the number of posts and threads in their game forums alone:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forum.php?s=069d9638552c617f5c89ba32a42a26c5
That shows a good number of people playing complex games, and like mentioned Paradox's wargames ARE complex. Civilisation, Total War etc aren't that complex compared to the complexity of Paradox's games.

Well.. no. Granted, that shows there are at least hundreds of people interested enough to post, but that doesn't really mean anythign.

I'd guess Civilization and Total War series are right on the edge, any added complexity and the mass market appeal (meaning a million sales vs 100K) is gone.

It's definitely alot more than few hundred. From the bottom of the forums: 439,742 members; those that bothered to register in the forums anyway. Still it shows activity and interest for complex games. Just because mainstreaming is the way for the biggest slice in the pie doesn't doesn't mean that all studios have to make everything to cater to the mass market, thankfully we got some studios who continue to make more than enough games to satisfy our craving for complex games, and if they're happy to make them, we are more than happy to buy them.

After watching those PAX videos about gameplay demonstrations and panels, it is clear that many of the changes to the original X-COM make sense individually, but I fear that the sum of those changes throws XCOM too much apart from the X-COM experience that I would have been interested to play.

Specifically the combining of the small squad size and the two actions for each "unit" per turn is something that I can't comprehend at all, either give us large scale battles with huge armies that are limited by that two action feature or if you must, a small specialized strike team with traditional time units that let us advance a few steps and spend the rest of the TUs in multiple snapshots if we please.

When you try to address so many "flaws" of the original there is a huge risk that you end up with different type of a game entirely which can please only the fans that hold the setting above game mechanics. Then again that brought millions of dollars (not a single cent from me though) to Bethesda so no wonder that there is no integrity in the game industry.

I think this is one case where I'm going to try it out for a bit first before judging whether a mix of redesigns is taking away from the experience. From what I can tell they're doing their best to make it a good experience.

Teaches me to look twice before posting. Have to admit that's a whole lot of members.
I'll just go eating crow and and adjusting my opinion of how many people actually like complex games.

It will more than likely have DRM and 2K has not released anything on GOG yet, so it may take even a decade or two before I get to play it and anyways we should judge it now when there is even a little bit of time left for the developers to, if not fix it before shipping, at least start patching it to be moddable enough to give those preferring the original a fighting chance at bringing back the missing features.

If we don't make enough noise now the game may end up hard coded in all the wrong places that prevent us from modding it to have more squad members, traditional time units, and multiple bases with transfer of goods and personnel between them. And maybe someone could even be inspired to create an algorithm that generates the tactical maps using Google Maps as a reference, only to be blocked from actually implementing it for this game because the developers forgot to implement a hook that modders can use to query the mission coordinates?

Imagine if the game would have been designed from the start to include a classic mode and advanced mode that lets us choose from a list of new features the ones that we want to have enabled like instakill head shots, original graphics, bug fixes and enhanced cargo space calculator that actually let us exchange one rocket launcher with multiple heavy plasma clips? Sure it costs more money to the publisher, but if you can combine the fans pleasing version to the streamlined version that brings the masses in the same package you end up with less enraged fans of the original and more positive word of mouth overall. It might even redeem yourself from past violations and have some more strongly opinionated gamers to lift their years long boycott over you and buy a bunch of your games as soon as you release them DRM free.

I'm one of those fortunate people who isn't that bothered by DRM so I'll let you know what I think after I play it ^^

And sure, it would be nice if they could cater to all sorts of audiences, but for now I'd prefer they do their best to make whatever audience the game is focused on have the best experience they can.

Nothing so far unfortunately, though it seems Steam will be carrying it (if I heard the PAX video correctly)

Well, you know what you have to do then. Sign up 2k and grab a few of the pre-order bonuses :P
Also, 1) they didn't rule out the pre-order bonuses being available at a later date, they only said that pre-order guarantees those and 2) We still have a bit more than a month until it's released, so who knows, maybe it will be up for pre-order.