The real problem with comparing to past editions is that past editions were tactically inept. Ranges were definitely too long. It makes most tactics that are likely to be employable by a small group of adventurers or monsters pretty much irrelevant. 3.5 fixed SOME things, but it certainly left a lot more on the table. The current balance between ranges and movement rates is actually pretty good. It generally allows for the possibility of closing with artillery but doesn't necessarily make it TOO easy.
Yes, that is one point I do really like about 4e. Now speed and movement-related abilities are much more important. Ranged 5, ranged 10 & ranged 20 are really different.
But that is a double-edged sword. 4e (and indeed many of the well-made tactical games) achieve this by restricting PCs' (or units') capability. That is a basic theory to make a combat game more tactical and fun.
But it also means that, when a combat goes beyond those expected restrictions in some way (say, involves a lot of flying monsters), because of those restrictions, PCs may end up being powerless.
This usually does not happen in, say, a board game. The situation is set by the game itself and something beyond expectation never happens.
But D&D is a RPG and thus users (DMs) try to represent various situations they can imagine in their fantasy world. Some of them may go beyond the basic expectation of 4e combat system. For example, this is a game called Dungeons and Dragons. And WotC is selling a lot of dragon miniatures. Isn't it natural that someone got a nice dragon toy want to let it fly in the open field and attack heroes? It has wings indeed.
While I really like 4e's combat system and admit that is in overall much fun comparing to most other RPGs, I do notice 2 problem caused by that.
First one is that, it is rather hard for a newbie DM to make a good combat encounter. You cannot just grab appropriately leveled monsters from MM and let PCs fight against them. Many aspects beyond monsters' toughness and DPR affects on the difficulty of each encounters. And a DM may easily end up making a totally boring encounter or an encounter which PCs can do nothing. I have heard a lot of complains and disconcertedness from newbie DMs. In this case, "newbie" does not mean they are totally new to RPGs, tabletop games or even to D&D. But even many DMs who are familiar to previous edition D&Ds are feeling that making good encounters for 4e is difficult.
Another problem is that, it is often hard to represent various situations and scenes which can be likely happen in a world of sword and sorcery.
It's a fantasy game. And MM contains stats of dragons. Oh! of course dragons can fly and can use dragon breath right? Now why not let dragons fly in open field and attack heroes? Yep, now our PCs are L6 and Young Blue Dragon is L6 and thus ....
It doesn't work, of course.
I have heard first complain when some guys are trying to convert Red Hand of Doom into 4e. The campaign contains a lot of situations typical to fantasy movies, novels and other fictions. They could be represented in 3.5e without much problem.
Now, when they wanted to represent those situations in 4e, some of the scenes are totally beyond the expected standard of 4e combat encounters and thus, they had to completely rewrite the situations.
If one bothers to read the guidelines, yes, it actually is.
You really can't blame the game for not arming DMs when it presents really good advice to use the tools that it has.
The flaws inherent in things like flying vs melee isn't a 4th edition flaw... not even a D&D flaw. It's a flaw with every rpg ever. This is hardly new.
Well, while those guidelines may be enough for you (and me), I am afraid of that is not enough for newbie DMs. Yeah, as I wrote above.
