tried to play this online yesterday, showed 6 servers unranked and 5 ranked. of these, several would not connect at all and the others showed impossibly high ping times. is this game dead already for online play?

More or less yes.
If code Masters don't come up with dedicated Servers for PC, I think they will lose that portion of thier userbase for good.
Dedicated servers are not so important for the console users so you can see shere CM's heart is.

SD

Hackers attacked a lot of ranked servers last night we had several using speed hacks and they efected other players games causing the hosts to shutdown their servers

sure the console version don't really need DSS, but theirs plenty of stuff holding back this game for the console too... and if their isn't some serious support for both versions... it will be dead by years end... if it ain't already.

JMO

I second that, dedicated servers are the least of this game's online worries. Coop is fun though.

Most of the people having low opinions of this title simply havent given it a chance and have rushed to judgement I myself love it sure it got issues but IMHO its better than anything else out there if played the way it was meant to be played........tactically most people are of the twitch game ilk..........run an gun types, this title has REAL depth tactically

It doesn't matter how tactical you are when the hit detection is completely broken.

I think detection is fine, but the issue with it is in the game types. Limited respawns improve things, but infiltration isn't properly set up IMO. I'd like to have a more conventional attack/defend siege game with multiple possible objectives that rotate from round to round.

Come to think of it, back when MP details came out they described Infiltration like this:
"The Xbox 360 version will be limited to eight players, either in two competing squads of four players each, or two squads of four players each playing cooperatively against six AI squads of PLA soldiers."

As far as I've seen, you can't have all humans on one side fighting 6 squads of PLA. Has anyone else found a way to do that? When I've played this with friends, the game forced you onto opposing teams. Maybe only the pc version allows this? I haven't picked that up yet I'm still on 360.
To be honest, I LOVE the AI factor on the 360. It turns the game into an RTS almmost. It would be nice to have that as an option though, with more players possible.