Honestly, I'm not sure how other games break down; I never paid an awful lot of attention to SWTOR's population and server situation while I was playing that at launch; there were a troutload more worlds to choose from than Square Enix has offered for either FFXI or FFXIV, though.

Final Fantasy XI was a huge financial success for Square Enix, and in nearly a decade of playing the game, I never saw more than 3,000 players concurrently logged in (usually prime time was around 2,200-2,400 even after population decline demanded server merges). Keep in mind that the 5,000 simultaneous connections figure is how many people are playing the game at any given time, not how many people have characters on that particular server. I do not think it is anything that we need be concerned about.

For a look at the other end of the spectrum, while I cannot find any concrete examples of simultaneous connections numbers for World of Warcraft, they have 504 active "realms," each of which is composed of four world servers, a main database server, and an instance server. Assuming an even distribution of players (total population is approximately 10.2 million) across these servers (it is by no means anywhere near even), that would suppose approximately 20,240 players on every server. Given that Blizzard seems to have a far more robust system of servers for each realm in WoW, it sounds like Square Enix's 5,000 simultaneous connections per server is perfectly reasonable.

And yes, not a lot of new information. It's mostly confirmation and details of things that we've already been told about.