Heh, try playing on Hard or Brutal difficulty using only the barracks.

Yeah. The game is very much designed to appeal to non-RTS fans on a lot of levels, and normal difficulty is pretty easy for that reason. Most RTS die-hards I know switched to brutal difficulty after a few missions and enjoyed it a lot more.

What's Battle.net like? Only Blizzard's 'always connected' claims struck me as a little too familiar (UbiDRM). I take it it's not at all like that?

For online playing, you must be connected (obviously).
For single player, if you disconnect during a mission, it won't track your stats / achievements. That's pretty much it.

You can also choose to play as a guest and not have to sign in at all. No multiplayer or achievement tracking, of course.

Well that's not so bad. Thanks.

I tried to give you a link that detailed off-line play, oddly enough, it is no longer available. You will need to do some research as the negatives are being glossed over for now, discounted at the minimum. Maybe after the hype wears off . . . =)
I loved SC but . . .
Edit: Not the link I wanted to give you but an interesting link just the same.

Almost done with downloading the game. 7 hours of play, gotta use them wisely! Probably online stuff and vs. AI, I don't wanna spoil myself for when I have the full game.

Little things most companies don't think to do:
Got to the part of the campaign where you make the first choice between one avenue or the other. Went to my mission database afterward to find that the alternate choice is there, waiting to be played with one click. Awesome.

Unfortunately, after you beat the game you can't unlock the secret mission without playing the campaign over again. Hopefully Blizzard will patch in the ability to do so.

I haven't read all the other posts in this thread to avoid spoilers but I am wondering if anybody else has sometime strange bugs with the achivements after reloading save game ?
Normally I don't care at all about achivements, but I am making an exception for SC2, but they seem kind of bugged.
If I reload my "Smash and Grab" savegame and finish again the mission I keep getting the "Wing of Liberty : Hard" achivement... everytime I finish the mission the "number of played hard mission" counter increase by 5!
And now after refinishing the same mission I just got the "Brutal" and "Artefact" achivements even thought I only played one or two mission in Brutal and only found 2 artefacts.

I think this is one of the bugs...report to Blizzard.

Already did, I was just wondering if anybody else had the same issue.

I had no idea what you were talking about but I looked it up... glad I got a head's up, thanks. Does this mean there is actually 30 missions? Or is it more of a brief joke mission or something?
I just got the Protoss missions open, so I am jazzed.

I have no idea how long the bonus mission is, but I got the impression that it was somewhat similar to the Brood War bonus mission, which was a cool glimpse of what would happen in the Protoss missions of Starcraft 2. I'm one of those people who missed the chance to unlock it.
The Protoss missions are a treat, by the way. I think you'll enjoy them.