I am prety sure if I had their hardware SC2 would run flawlessly.
I was sure too. In fact, I have a very huge experience in playing high-demanding games on poor computers, I even played KOTOR on Pentium 2, 16 Mb NVidia GeForce 1, 64 Mb RAM, 1Gb hard drive - and it ran fine, of course, on lowest settings. Living in a poor country (now not so poor, but still) gives an advantage of learning how to utilize your resources with a maximum efficiency. And, I should say, Starcraft 2 is the only 2 game I can't run well on lowest settings even on high-end laptop, let alone those students' netbooks. No tweaking helps me if I play SC2 4v4 match and army sizes come close to 100/200 for every player. This is just ridiculous.
This could be anything from heat (if the card overheats it starts to reduce clock rate inorder to prevent damage) to poor drivers (very common with AMD cards).
Again, in my case it is neither. GPU-Z shows that video card (NVidia GTX 560M) is utilized on 100% even if I play SC2 on lowest settings in 1024x768. I don't get how it can be so. I could blame it on something in my Windows or settings, but the fact that NOT A SINGLE other game has such things shows that Blizzard really messed up with SC2 optimization.
In WarCraft III JASS executes extreemly slowly...
I won't argue on that part since I'm not competent enough. But there is a simple comparison. Take Legion TD map in WC3 and it's SC2 clone Squadron TD. Similar unit numbers, similar map size, so on. In WC3 the map won't lag at all, no matter how many units were sent. In SC2 on lowest settings on high-end computers game lags since the first second and becomes pretty much unplayable after 20 ingame minutes. So what's the point of all these optimizations if, as a result, game performes much worse?
If there is then something is not right with your computer hardware (which should not be the case for gamming cards from Nvidia and performance processors from Intel). I have constant 60 FPS on ultra in such situations with only the odd frame drop when content is first loaded
I have been in gaming since 1992, I believe, and I learned well that you should always take NVidia and Intel, not ATI/AMD. I have Intel Core i7 processor (I believe, 2.4 GHz) and Nvidia GeForce GTX 560M card (1.5 GB). With this setup I can only dream of playing Ultra, I can't even play Medium, and Lowest still lags sometimes. However I've read many topics with people complaining, and they have very different setups. I guess you were just lucky that your processor + video card combination proved to suite SC2 well.
Maybe there is no problem with graphics or processor performance in SC2. It just may be something wrong with optimization for certain hardware. But does it really matter? I can't imagine how bad should optimization be if the game runs far from perfect with the graphics and physics set to look like in games of early 2000s on any modern computer at all.
Infact StarCraft II might even perform the same with just 2 processors as it cannot even load 2 to 100% due to synchronization required.
Yes, looks like this is the case. At least it is so, according to Task Manager.
The game has a totally different set of requirements from a RTS game and so will perform differently.
Not in graphical part. Graphics can be any in any game, so graphics in SC2 could as well be more complex than in Crysis.
If the CPU is bottlenecking then you should consider upgrading to a quad core with atleast 2.7 GHz
Funny thing is that in my case actually processor time is mostly wasted (about 15% or so go to SC2, and that is by the end of a game, and at start it's 10%), but GPU is bottlenecking. But it is the same GPU I used to play on highest settings in many different games, all went well, maybe, except for Dragon Age II (but there Bioware admits that optimization in DA2 is just terrible). So how comes I can't play SC2 without lag on lowest settings??? I'm totally confused...