Seriously??
Just to name a few skills…
Diplomacy, Streetwise, Bluff, and Intimidate are all extremely useful “in town”, depending on the exact nature of the situation.
Some classes (bards in particular) have utility powers and rituals which may be extremely useful “in town”.
Arcana, History, Religion, and Nature could all be useful for giving hints on solving puzzles or riddles (though, honestly, puzzles and riddles seem to usually be a player challenge, rather than a character challenge).
What Kenobi said. Sorry Chronos, but you’re flat out wrong there. There’s still a skill section on the character sheet, and how many and which you’re good at is still determined by your class and ability scores. And most of them, believe it or not, are intended primarily for out of combat use, though nearly all of them have SOME sort of combat rider as well.
It’s quite possible to build a bard with a sparkling personality who can charm his way into the queen’s bedchamber. In fact, bards even get a class feature that helps with…er… well, diplomacy checks. 
Fighters, on the other hand, are limited to Athletics, Endurance, Heal, Intimidate, and Streetwise, and let’s just say that even if they’re trained in one of the latter two, they probably don’t have the charisma score to back them up.
And Rangers have utility powers that let them lend another player their skill in something - “here, let me show you how to do that” sort of thing.
There is definitely more emphasis on the mechanics of the system, and much of those mechanics are focused around combat. That’s pretty much what D&D has always been about, and if you want a game that’s focused on something other than killing people and taking their stuff, you probably want a game other than D&D.
It’s not that there are mechanics, but that they are used badly and without explanation. There’s no game more mechanical than Champions, but it’s incredibly well-balanced and very flexible. DnD4 tries to be well-balanced, generally fails, and doesn’t really do anything of interest. If you want to play a tactics game, there are better. In fact, no matter what you want to do, there are better.
I think we’re just going to have to agree to disagree. You clearly have an intense dislike of 4E, to the point that you’re stating your opinions as though they were objectively true facts.
In comparison to previous editions of D&D, 4E is the most balanced mechanically. When you compare it to Champions, you’re comparing games with a dramatically different fundamental structure – Champions is based completely on building with points, while 4E retains levels.
It’s worth noting that while Champions is very nicely balanced for superhero-level point values, the Hero System at its core is f**ing horrible at low point levels. They had to retrofit in some awful additional charts and crap to make a distinction between STR 17 and STR18, for example. And the amount of math involved in putting together a character makes even earlier editions of D&D seem attractive, if what you wanted is something in the beer and pretzels category. You don’t have to do the math, but if you take a stock character, your friends who optimize will be dramatically outperforming you in system terms.
For similar reasons, GURPS falls apart above 300 points or so. Point-based games in general tend to get out of whack when you put point values into the system that are out of the intended range - in GURPS, if you have 400 or 500 points, you can buy everything you ever wanted.
4E is designed to facilitate combat-focused fantasy adventuring, with all characters having an effective role to play in combat. Again, if that’s not the game you want to play, choose something else. If you want to play that kind of game but don’t want the kind of flavor or system overhead that 4E offers, choose a different game. But 4E is not bad for everyone just because you don’t like it.
*I should know, I’m the biggest optimizer of characters I know. I’m renowned within my gaming groups as the guy who finds the broken parts of the rules system.
Since when has that mattered? (Not being snarky, actually want to know since I’ve never done 4.0.)
In 3/3.5, stats were worth considerably less than skill points when it came to skill checks. In 3.0, a rogue with one level of Bard (since perform skill determined your bard songs, not the class) who used charisma as a relative dump stat could usually out-bard the bard. (Maybe not on the magic end, but the bard spells weren’t all that great, particularly if you had a wizard and cleric in your party already.)
3.5 balanced that out a bit, though. But skill points were still far superior to stats when determining checks.
To be fair, though, that’s a damn hard thing to do. Starcraft is the exception, rather than the norm, in being able to do so.
4E skills are pretty simple; basically, all skills are based on a single stat, and take their base value from the stat’s bonus (which is (stat-10)/2, so CHA 12 is +1, CHA 14 is +2 and so on). Training in a skill gives you +5.
So a CHA 18 Bard has an untrained Intimidate of 4, or a trained Intimidate of 9.
Skills function as a straight bonus to a roll of a d20, with the target number set according to difficulty. You usually get a bonus on all rolls of your level/2, so our Bard, assuming he’s level 8, would have an additional +4 for a net +13 on his Intimidate roll.
If he’s trying to scare off some kobolds, the target number is 20 (there are a bunch of kobolds, so they have backup, and are feeling brave). 7 or higher will do it.
Well, except for the rest in between combat rounds, we’ve spent the last six months more or less in combat. When it takes you an hour to roll dice because you’ve been drinking too much, not paying attention, and D&D is the least important thing going on during the evening - things can move a little slow…I blame the system 
I gotta disagree. D&D 3E serviced the combat aspects very well, and serviced the non-combat aspects very well. There is nothing I’ve discovered that 4E does objectively better than 3E, and many things that it doesn’t do as well.
This has more or less already been answered, but the short form is “there are no skill points in 4E”.
Either you are “trained” in a skill for +5, or you are not. Everyone gets half their level added to their skill checks but otherwise, it’s Ability mod + Trained(Y/N) + random misc bonuses (you can get +1s and +2s from various sources - items, feats, races, etc.). But fundamentally, aside from the half level that everyone gets, the lion share of your skill contribution is going to be your ability score, particularly as you level and your scores creep upwards. (A 12th level character with a +6 in their primary ability score is not at all uncommon.).
So really, the only time when you really shine in a skill is when you are both strong in the associated stat AND trained in it. It’s okay to be “okay” at some skills - the ‘personal’ ones where everyone needs to make their own checks like Endurance or Athletics, but being ‘okay’ at diplomacy or intimidate just means that the character who’s good at it makes the check instead.
Bwahaha!
I’m not even laughing about the second, although there are a lot of interesting things 3rd lets you do that you can’t in 4th edition combat. But “served the non-combat aspects very well”? 3e/3.5 and 4e stand among among the absolute worst “modern” RPG’s systems for anything non-combat. There are few things to do, and you have few ways of doing them. In fact, almost all of the non-combat utility is posessed by Wizards and Sorcerers, while Rogues trail far behind with a few dinky skills, many of which can be easily made obsolete by low-level spells and magic items. Most other classes have jack.
I didn’t say there weren’t other systems that do it better; that wouldn’t be relevant to my point, which is that 3E is a superset of 4E in terms of options for play. It includes everything 4E does, and then some.
And I disagree with you.
Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses. 3E was a nightmare to run at high levels (bad guys with 3-page stat blocks which you had to study for a week to run them optimally - OK, I exaggerate). 4E is fantastic for the DM - everything is so easy to put together. 3E, in contrast, was a large exercise in math.
4E also handles the economy of actions much better. Most of the time, all of the players have something useful to do. Wizards don’t end up just sitting on the edge and pinging pointlessley with a crossbow because they ran out of spells; fighters don’t just wait 20 minutes for their turn to come round again so they can just roll to hit; everyone gets to do stuff.
Fighters, frankly, were pretty limited in 3E. Move (occasionally) and roll to hit. That was about it. In 4E they can choose all sorts of maneuvers and make all sorts of choices. The wizards had fun casting varied spells for a while, then ran out and sat out the rest of the combat, pretty much.
I also like that the dependence on magic items and buffs is reduced. In 3E, a character would start to resemble a christmas tree, he had so many magical items on him - and those items were *needed *to balance him against the other facets of the system (monsters, other PCs, and so on) - it was built right into the math of the game. Added to that was the morning buff ritual - OK, we’re all immune to poison, fire, we can all fly, we all have +5 to hit and +3 to AC, we all… blah blah… every single time.
I’m not saying 4E doesn’t have it’s weaknesses. A lot of the powers do feel very samey; skill challenges are a terrible mess; magic items and spells are pretty bland.
But I can’t agree that there is nothing that 4E does better than 3E. There’s plenty of stuff it does better, just like there’s splenty of stuff that 3E does better.
I’m going to point you to the word ‘objectively’ in my statement. You like 4E’s handling of combat better. I like 3E’s better. Therefore, it’s not a criteria we can objectively compare. On the other hand, things like granularity and number of options for characters are things that can be compared, without resort to subjectivity.
Well, we all gotta play what we wanna play.
I like 3E. I don’t mean to give the impression that think 4E is better. But I do think that each system has its own strengths and weaknesses.
That’s a feature, not a bug. If you don’t like that simple way of playing, in 3.x, you had the option of just not playing a fighter. On the other hand, if you do like that simple way of playing, in 4e you don’t have an option of avoiding it.
So what was your option if you wanted to play a standard “fighter type” AND you wanted a variety of options each round?
From the core rules, maybe a monk. The splatbooks introduced some more interesting options (personally, I love the swashbuckler (from Complete Warrior, IIRC)).
Warrior cleric.
Seriously, the more I think about it, the more obvious this becomes to me - let’s assume that fighters didn’t have enough to do in 3E. I don’t agree, but it’s clear the 4E design team felt as you do. That only casters really always have something to do, both in an out of combat.
So, the solution they came up with wasn’t really a revamp of the fighter class or what it means to be a fighter - they just made the fighter a caster class. They made every class a caster class.
Bully, says you. Now everyone has something to do all the time, and all men are equal.
Well, if you really enjoy the style of game 4E has on offer, you can do it in 3E. The player characters would be two clerics and two sorcerers. One cleric focuses on Heals - he’s the Leader. The other on buffs and hand to hand. He’s the Defender. One sorcerer does crowd control - the Controller. The other does damage. The Striker.
So, by eliminating 90% of 3E’s options, you can accurately simulate 4th Edition. you don’t even need any house rules.