If you leave the airport in a rental car you need to be aware that we are in road hell construction in and around the airport. Updates can be found on this website
http://www.dfwconnector.com/index_flash.php. If you are going to go anywhere west of the airport like Grapevine, Southlake, Fort Worth I highly recommend you allow extra time and check out the traffic updates. If you head east to Dallas proper or northeast to Addison or Plano it won't be much of an issue once you clear the airport.
There are a lot of restaurants and shopping in Southlake Town Square, twenty minutes from the airport, forty five minutes in rush hour or when a lot of lanes are closed.
http://www.southlaketownsquare.com
Grapevine has a nice downtown, restaurants and clubs, 15 minutes from the airport, again 45 minutes if it is rush hour and the lanes are jacked up. There is a huge Bass Pro Shop in Grapevine that has a brewery and steakhouse called Uncle Buck's.
http://www.downtowngrapevinetexas.com/
http://restaurants.basspro.com/UncleBucksSteakhouse/
If you want to venture further west to Sundance Square you can burn an entire afternoon and evening in the area. Shops, bookstores, movie theater, coffee shops, restaurants and night clubs for later.
http://www.sundancesquare.com/
There are a couple of other FT threads that have a lot of information in them.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/texas...s-what-do.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/texas...do-dallas.html