I do think CA sort of painted themselves in a corner by making this game require such a heavy-duty gaming system to even run it at all; my computer's barely a year old and it can't handle it with 3.0 dual core CPU, 4G DDR2 RAM and a 512MB video card--it's like a slideshow. There's no way the casual gamer can run this without a major hardware investment. The leap from M2TW is pretty startling---I can run that maxed out but ETW is no go
My CP is about 1/2 yours and runs Empires fine at medium settings. The problem is Hardware incompatibility, not that your CP cant handle it. That, as has been stated, repeatedly, is an issue that is not really as common as it seems. I, for example, have a 3 year old middling system (although I do have a new graphics card) with only 2 GB ram and a single core 3.0 Pentium and an integrated sound card with Windows XP pro.

Game Play, out of the box, is certainly FAR superior to M2. The only MAJOR gameplay bug is that the AI is completely unable to launch a naval invasion. M2 had the SAME bug, on top of that Peasants were the most fearsome unit on the battlefield and the AI in battles would just stand there and let you shoot all your arrows at them with no reaction whatsoever. True, the battle AI in Empires is a disappointment after all the hype about it, but it's not nearly that bad. Hardware issues aside, anyone who thinks Empires is in a worse state out of the box then M2 dose not really remember the first 2 months M2 was out. (That said, M2 turned out to be a very good game IMHO, when all the bugs were finally fixed in the 1.2 patch.) I cant comment on Rome OOB, as I was still busy playing M1 at that point, and didn't get Rome until about 6 months after it came out.