Apparently RealNetworks bowed down to the almighty MPEG-LA recently. They pushed a minor codec update to RealOne that now supports MPEG-4 playback. That or the issues are starting to resolve themselves. That or Real just made a deal saying 'Hey, we only want to do playback, and since our users and ourselves won't get hit by anything but the decoder fee, why don't we pay that and you let us ship the codec?'
Either way, the fact that my friend has had MPEG-4 support for the past 3 days legally is rather amusing. (And I don't condone going after a QT6 DP, since it isn't right, and Apple disabled MPEG-4 encoding anyways... So you still have the issue of trying to find MPEG-4 content)