Pretty much literally too - they copied everything into 3D, right down to the explosions and the fires breaking out on structures when they're damaged. It's literally the exact same thing so far, and I'm sure it's going to get rave reviews 
It's like . . . for a few years, my computer was very outdated. So I didn't play any modern games for quite a while. Then I moved, finally got a new computer, etcetera. My buddy shows me some of the latest games, Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2 and I'm like "isn't this the same game I played like 5 years ago, just with better graphics? I mean, Legolas is destroying a stone castle with a bow and arrow. Is it still just melee, ranged attacks and hitpoints?"
And yeah, a few games have some innovations . . . but they're all pretty minor from what I've seen. I've yet to play anything particularly ground breaking.
The thing that bugged the hell out of me with Starcraft (which I only played recently for the first time btw), is that . . .on the map, all the units are pretty much the same size. Roughly. And then they go to these cut scenes, and the Zerg aerial bombardment creatures are freaking huge . . . and they have these huge epic battle scenes with people dying and homeworlds being destroyed, and whatever . . and then I go back to the game, and I think "er, that doesn't look like what I'm playing." SC2 looks the same. And yeah, I understand abstraction . . . but in comparison: Dawn of War at least, looks like it integrates some scale between the units, the dropships are the size of dropships, the Ork robots the size they should be, etcetera . . when I finally pick up a better graphics card I'll think I'll be impressed. Right now it's just sitting on my shelf collecting dust though.
