I really hope that the launch into orbit is now seamless as far as Earth graphics are concerned. One of the big annoyances of SSM2007 for me was the way that the high resolution Florida suddenly transformed into a low resolution version at a certain altitude. That seriously destroys the sense of realism, and also messes up videos of the launch from an external perspective. This also needs to be the case when returning to Earth.
That will be fixed a bit (a lot) by the new global earth resolution that we use now on SSMS2. But we can't have a full earth resolution like the one we use just for Florida.
Right now the program is prepared to use 250 meter per pixel textures on the whole globe. All in all 3168 textures.
That means 12.6 gigabytes of textures and masks for the globe allone ;-P.
The textures resolution you see now is still over 8 times higher then the original high resolution for SSM2007.
