I'm not sure how many people have played this yet, but there is a tutorial out now that you can play.

Here are my thoughts on it:
-The story is nothing fancy, not that a tutorial requires one. Tutorials might be skipped by experienced players, or people who want to jump into the game. Good stories should be saved for something like the campaign. Anyways, the story involves a group of Terrans who after fleeing the Drengin for a time have found some place safe to settle down and rebuild. The Iconians are in the area, so they can be friends if you are not jerks (I haven't tried to play as an jerk yet so I wouldn't know how that would play out).
-The map is setup in such a way that you can play around. I found that the Iconians did not even try to colonize any planets. This left most of the small map open for you to play with. You have the time to go figure things out, as the AI doesn't appear to be capable of much of anything.
-You were given instructions as to things you should do, such as to how to colonize a planet or how to do research. The response you could give these people included stuff like "show me how..." where a new window would pop open which included a video and some text below. It wasn't much of a video, as it was practically a repeating animated image. The video could have been more, such as being longer and/or have the option to pause. The image plays for about 3 to 5 seconds, which is enough time to show you how to do something, but it is far from an instruction video. The bulk of the information is really in the text below the repeating animated image. I found that the fact the image repeats without stop to be a little distracting when trying to read.
-The tutorial does offer objectives that you can do on your own pace, such as take out a nearby pirate base.
-The tutorial does seem to offer enough information, then when you start a proper game, that you can potentially win against AIs of your own skill level. The tutorial did cover colonizing worlds, developing planets, researching techs, building ships at shipyards, fighting battles, and invading planets. I think that covers all the basics you need. It didn't cover things like the United Planets, rally points, and I think it was light on designing your own ships and building starbases. There were many topics that you would do well to know, but they were not covered or covered well in the tutorial.

Some bugs:
-The Iconians talk about open boarders treaty at some point. I was given a job that I needed to complete first... blah blah blah. Long story short, I finished it, had the talk, so I opened the diplomacy screen to set one up, but I couldn't find open boarders as something I could select. I found out later that it was turned on automatically (I don't know when it had happened). I don't think turning it on automatically would help many people to learn to implement it. I think that new players should try to implement it once during the tutorial.
-When the Iconians showed me a planet, I had to look for it. Mind you I was given vision of it so it could spot in unexplored territory. However, if I had already explored that region of space, with lets say auto explore, I might not have noticed it so quickly. Further more, when zoomed in, you could see arrows pointing to the planet, but they never went away, even after colonizing it.

Some ways to improve:
-Some of the content would fit well in an in-game encyclopedia. I'm thinking that there could be a chapter for tutorials where the individual pages could include videos and text. However, that would probably require enough work that it would warrant it being made a DLC or at least held off to be worked on in a later patch.
-Like I said earlier, some topics are either not well covered, or not covered at all. You certainly didn't see anything about rally points, United Planets, or extreme world colonization. These might be topics that some players might be get hung up on.