Well, I have SC4 in my hands now... getting it installed is another thing. It may be due to some obscure oddity on the laptop CD-ROM, but this is about the slowest installation of a 2-CD program that I've ever seen. It's taken about 2-3 hours so far and I'm about 90% done. What's odd is that the install window is just still images of various in-game cities (screen-shots) with no text, or anything else. Rather boring actually (instead of odd). I'm used to subtle humor from Maxis and expected various pithy sayings or puns or in-jokes during the installation screens.

Update: It seems to be something with the laptop's CD-ROM, install was a lot faster on the video editing PC. The only other annoyance during the install is that when I move the install status window off to the side, when it flips to the next "image" it recenters the dialog box (grrrr...).