Hi,
just a bit of feedback on my experience.
I initially tried installing straight from disc (DVD Collector's Edition box with untouched T-Shirt!), having not read the Tips & Tricks section and met with failure. Steam worked but would randomly crash, usually while loading up news.
After seeing mention of installing Steam via Crosstie, I did that. Then I was wary of downloading several gigs of game data over the internet when I had the DVD right there, so I simply ran the installer from the DVD and installed into the Steam bottle. Steam picked it up a.o.k.
From there on I had the issue that's been mentioned here before where the opening Valve credits would play and then I'd have a black screen.
Going into the Set Launch Options in Steam, I set the following:
-novid -32bit -dxlevel 80 -refresh 60
And now it's working fine :) I'm pretty certain it's the -32bit switch that does the trick.
Hope this helps someone else!