Well there are plenty of ways to get things done, I'm always for the most direct path.
This got me thinking about CS4 stitching, so I ran few tests using a nightmare pano set. 28mm lens, camera tilted severely upward, len centering probably a few mm from optimum. The worst thing you can do to panoramic stitching software.
The composite image is a CS4 cylindrical projection. I have marked a few stitching errors on the cropped image. Most of the image stitched pretty well. As expected the indicated extreme area has some errors. PTGui and other stitching programs would also give these errors on the first go-around, the main difference is that by carefully editing control points, I was able to get excellent final results with PTGui, but with CS4 there is really no recourse at this point. (Does CS4 have some further adjustments I don't know about yet?). But the bottom line is, the CS4 results are pretty good and on less tortured pano sets the results are essentially perfect (usually).
The curvy image is CS4's Spherical projection. If there is a way in CS4 to correct it, I wasn't able to find it. OTOH stitching is essentially perfect. In PTGui it would take just a few seconds to fix this by dragging and rotating the image with the mouse. The thing with this image is, spherical projection works better than cylindrical because the "hump" in the steel beams is less pronounced in a straightened-out spherical projection.
So it looks like CS4 is almost there for problem stitching, and possibly already there for most mainstream stitching. Sure would be great to be able to do it all in one program! But for now I'm holding on to PTGui, since it can fix all the "not-quites" still lurking in the CS4 stitching paradigm.