So after all of the podcast coverage and talk from Brad I finally broke down and bought SC2 today. I've been holding out for PC reasons and the fact that I know that this game will suck my life away. God Damn it Brad, why did you do this to me! 
 
I logged a metric ton of hours into SC/Brood wars but thats was years ago. How accessible is this to a pretty familiar SC/WC3 player? Someone please tell me its like riding a bike. Also I have PC concerns. i was able to play L4D2 pretty well with minimal jerk, but i know there is alot more going on. I exceed all the minimum req except proc which is just a step behind the minimum. Its a laptop so I'm boned for upgrades, but does anyone see this as being a problem? I'm not looking at running ultra, just being able to play period. 
 
Again Brad, this is your fault. You have forsaken me with your grand tales of starcraft and inevitably are going force me into building/buying a new PC just to play starcraft. God Damnit!

Ugh Brad is the worst!

The minimum requirements are not set in stone, if you are close to the minimum, then you should be ok but you will be cutting it very close. As far as i am aware blizzard is all about the lowest requirements possible to get as many people into the tent as possible. That is why i feel you should be ok but get ready to set everything low.

You can go below the min requirements and still run it.
And it is very much a 'riding a bike' thing, there are a lot of subtle changes but the core game feels very much the same, shouldn't take you long to get the hang of at all.

Turn off voice chat when you're in the game -- it takes up some unnecessary processing time. Playing on all low should hopefully be fine, but the worst feeling you get is when you lag in a 1v1. You have to have a really smooth experience to micro well and if you can't, you'll be at a huge disadvantage :<

If the game is unbearably laggy, you can try enabling Triple Buffering, and disabling V-Sync. I'm not sure if those settings are in SC2, but if not, you can force-enable/disable them in some type of hardware performance control panel (like the NVIDIA Control Panel.)
In some cases, it can boost the framerate by as much as 20 FPS.

TBH, this is the worst thing about SC2, i got a high end laptop 2 years ago... i never thought that it would expire by the time SC2 came out, i was expecting slightly harder to run than W3, but i hate running low specs and still lagging. 

I got SC2 because of Brad but its been dusting on my shelf since. I can't seem to get around to playing it. 

My Pc was top of the line like, 6 years ago, and runs SC2.  You'll be fine.

I'd never played a Blizzard RTS before and I'm not good at Starcraft II but believe me, it's still possible for pretty much anyone who has a remote idea what they're doing to win matches.

I have an i7 running my box, it seems to run SC2 well.

To update It did run very well on the laptop. I had misread the 2.4 GHZ P4 as a 2.4 dual core minimum. I've got a 1.87 DC proc so I still run it on low, but it runs like a champ. First match played as zerg against a medium AI and got it handed to me in a big time way. Second match as terrans I still got beat down, but it wasnt as severe. Someone is surely going to get some easy wins on my behalf very soon. =)