I agree, but I think that is why we need to NOT fall into the mentality of "computers will never be able to play good without cheating" or "computers will never be able to play at a human level". There are already plenty of examples I could give that prove that with devotion of time and resources, artificial intelligence of very high quality is quite possible.
Please don't think that I am dogging Dominions on this. I am really impressed with the algorithms that the ai uses and believe it is a very solid opponent even at the non-cheating difficulty levels, until the human player learns the game and improves his tactics over time. However, as many people have noted, there is certainly room for improvement, and if pointing out those weaknesses and possible solutions or improvements in any way gets developers and publishers of this or any other game to give the ai more attention, then I'm all for it.
While I am at it, here are some links for those interested in learning more about artificial intelligence and how far it has come (and has yet to go):
http://www.gameai.com/
One to check out closely at this site is "Cloak, Dagger, and DNA". It is a Risk like game that uses genetic algorithms. It can be downloaded from that page as well. Very cool.
http://i5.nyu.edu/~mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html
ELIZA--A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine
http://satirist.org/learn-game/
Machine Learning in Games
http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
Home Page of The Loebner Prize--"The First Turing Test"
http://www.freewebs.com/ballbariansw/links.htm
This is a link to my own links page with links to the above and other ai and alife sites that I found interesting.