Ah, that'll explain the resolution! Wonder if they upped the GPU for the EX range??? I think they now come with 80MB harddisks too.
The 4GB limit isn't too bad though. My Hyper-V server is running a VM with Windows Embedded Server 2009 installed, the whole OS comes to about 450MB!
In fact, I once built a full version of XP which came in at about 600MB. The rest is just screensavers, pictures, and junk... Checkout nLite on Google.