Yeah, I'd bought it immediately as well, after seeing it in some Twitch streams.
It really IS what Simcity 5 should have been. And anyone that compares the two in a negative way tends to say "Oh but the actual SIMULATION in Simcity 5 was so much deeper", to which I say "Okay, but that doesnt matter much if placing a single curved road eats up like 1/4th of the space of the whole zone; the tiny size makes it super unrealistic anyway."
The size really does make a difference, I love how I can have pretty much entirely different areas, quite distant from each other like you see IRL. I can make a middle-of-freaking-nowhere town like the one I live in and actually have it placed a far distance from the big urban "city" area with all the huge buildings. Wheras Simcity 5.... yeah. You couldnt do that. There wasnt even room for ONE area, let alone more, and let alone more that actually had DISTANCE between them. Ugh.
The only thing that bugs me is that I miss the random map generation that the Simcity series and similar games always had.
But yeah, the maps are huge. Like that single tile in your screenshot; apparently the game by default allows you to unlock a total of 9 tiles over the course of your city's progression. But there's also a mod that allows you to get all 25 possible tiles unlocked at once (with the final milestone opening all of them instead of just a 9th one). Saw it on Youtube, and good grief, the available space is absurd. You could never use that much space. Computer would explode long before you got that far, and it'd take a millionty years to fill up anyway....
So far, definitely enjoying the whole thing.