Steam just announced that Civ 5 will ship with Steamworks, this means that every retail copy will have to be activated trough Steam so that it can use stuff like Steam achievements, auto updating, Etc. And since other digital stores have refused to carry Steamworks titles in the past (modern warfare 2) i guess this means that Civ V is now a Steam exclusive. Discuss.

i'm removing it from my wishlist

Wonderful. Just another game that I will never play because Steam is a piece of shit / AKA "Steam Error during account creation, you're Steam is now glitched and will not work, too bad you entered your code, as it works only once"

Doesn't really bother me.
Steam is a much less annoying DRM model than a lot of others, so that is a plus.
I find I prefer my 4x games to be available over digital distribution (easier to impulse-play), and Steam is my favorite one for large games.
I was going to add it as a non-Steam Game either way :p
Would be nice if it were platform neutral, but it could be worse.
Now I just have to figure out if there is a non-digital deluxe version. Usually don't need the manual for Civ games (the Civilopedia works pretty well), but I like shinies :p

Is it bad that my favorite Civilization game was Civilization: Revolution?

And I've added it to mine. But my wishlist contains only regionally restricted titles that I cannot buy. Being a Sid Meier game and now Steam only, I'm fairly certain that Civ. 5 now falls in the soon to be regionally restricted bracket.

That is the recent console version, right?
Nothing wrong with that. Just means you prefer the shorter games, rather than the long meandering ones :p
That being said, Civ4's last expansion did a lot to cater to the longer and shorter games, so hopefully 5 will go even farther.

Fine by me. There aren't many digital outlets I really love and trust. While I don't necessarily like the closed nature of Steamworks, that's what often happens when you're the first to develop a set of services.
One thing I'm curious about, as I've never purchased a Steamworks-enabled title through retail: does it come with the same perks as buying through Steam directly, such as being able to redownload it without the disc should you ever need/want to?

It has a certain cartoon charm. The games could be pretty long though, especially online ones as far as I heard.

It is too bad that the official site sends you to civfanatics.com or apolyton.net if you want to discuss about their game.

You know you can just buy it retail and install it from disc like The Orange Box for example; this means that it will be activated on your Steam account but you will use the physical media to install so no download needed except for patches.
I'm actually really happy that it will be on Steam. Most of my games are there, most of the people I play with are there and if they will integrate match-making with the Friends List then it's even better.

too bad lots of "casual gamers" ( you know what i mean ) will buy it on Steam

Yes, yes it does.

You can download any game as many times as you want which is registered on Steam. But the number of activations is a different story, that depends on the DRM.