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I havn't played alot of older editions but what i gather is...

Combat:
4) Tactical:  You get 5-6 turns, things die slowly, making it worthwile to say... push things into a clump for your wizard to blast.
3.5) Simple: You get 1-2 turns, things (including you) die quickly... no need to push things if you can just kill them.

RP:
4) Undefined / Free: You are a paldin / rogue / druid: make up a personality.
3.5) Defined / Restricted: You are a paldin / rogue / druid: You abide by code X.

Balance:
4) Everyone is more or less balanced across all levels
3.5) Some classes start strong, but scale slowly.  Others start weak, but become powerful. 

Re: RPing in 4e.
I think the biggest long term stumbling block is  Skill Challenges. They can be great but they default to bad. When done ideally they should look like organic roleplaying, where players just have their PCs do what makes sense in character and that is (assuming PCs who know their own strengths and aren't trying to sabotage themselves) the course of action with the best chances of succeeding. At the end, the SC system should then give you a reasonable guideline for when to call the overall activity a success or failure, and what the implications are in terms of XP or other rewards.

The published rules for Skill Challenges fail here because they set up the wrong 'shape' to things. They assume you are in a scenario where trying and failing is definitely worse than not trying at all. This is reasonable for certain types of situations, such as a diplomatic effort, for example, where saying the wrong thing can make the person your trying to convince start hardening their attitude toward you and not want to keep listening.
For a lot of scenarios though, time is the limiting factor and if someone is doing nothing in such a scenario they are probably hurting the odds of overal success, and if they are aiding that is at the expense of making their own attempt. For such a case, you should be targetting a number of successes with each character having a fixed number of attempts (and an aid another costs one of those attempts but gives +2 instead of a success.. only reasonable to try if you are in over your head for accomplishing it yourself).
For some situations, it may be that each individual needs to succeed at something, and each failure comes at an individualized cost without a real risk of overal party failure. 

Hopefully 5e will revamp the Skill Challenge to address these different shapes and how to reward them appropriately. LFR has been doing a fair bit of experimenting in this area in some of the mods and it has helped.

Another aspect is that it is key to approach the skill challenge from a goal oriented perspective rather than a skill-rolling oriented perspective. IF the party is trying to escape from the city, and one of them has an ability to instantly make a portal the party can hustle through and let close behind them, that should serve as complete success, skill challenge over. If the best they can do is, say, make the whole party fly for a round, then that should probably be usable for a success with an appropriate description of how they slip into a back alley and use it to hop over a wall before the guard can catch them. Etc. Use your judgement as a DM to figure out what makes sense.      

Jan 31, 2012 -- 4:48AM, erachima wrote:

What people mean when they say that is that 4e doesn't dictate your character concept for you to nearly the same degree as the game used to. Turns out a lot of people want to play a role from a list, not create something personal.

Not a difficult desire to accomodate (see, for instance, the character concept generation appendix in HotFW), though it will also be an extremely easy area to screw up if they go back to "required" rather than "suggested".

I disagree with this sooo much.  While I dont feel that 4E necessarily places you into any specific role, neither did 3E.  I would even say that 3.5 was much better at allowing you to mix and match to assing the character personality to the way you want your character to react.  4E is only not bad at it because you can just reflavor all the power descriptions to be the way you want.  The 4E powers are kinda all the same eventually and blend together so you just invent your personality outside of what your character can really do.  Which has both good parts and bad parts to it.