Indeed. I've had wanted stars several times due to carjacking. Sometimes due to cops being near by, sometimes due to the car owner phoning the cops themselves (so now, of course, I always make sure I leave no witnesses behind
).
As for it being more of the same etc. etc. Sure, if you boil it down to its basic level. But the same can be said of any franchise game, or any games within the same genre as each other, if you really want to simplify it.
But it is so much more than GTA IV... It's bigger, more varied, has better characters, better story.
There've been some awesome missions for each character on their own and as a team. I've hijacked a cargo plane by flying a cropduster into the open ramp in mid air, driven out of another cargo plane on an ATV and skydived, piloted choppers and planes, rappelled down a building, parachute jumped onto the top of a mountain and then raced a push bike down the side, carried out assassinations and manipulated the stock market, and much more.
The multi-character aspect also makes it far better. The narrative works better than GTA IV because your characters have different missions tailored to their different skills, and get to follow their own path plus hook up regularly. The switching is brilliantly implemented, enabling you to flit between characters when they're doing their solo missions, and to switch *in mission* when doing team jobs. The ones where you play as two or three of them together are so well done, switching one to another to another, doing different parts of each heist.
There's just so much to do... I can spend hours just messing around, without touching a mission. Steal a fighter jet and go rampaging around the city from the air, use sticky bombs to blow up multiple cop cars and then spend ages being chased with a 5* wanted level. Or maybe do the actual activities or random encounters scattered around, the sports, the jobs, the hitchhikers, the armoured trucks, etc. etc.
I can see myself spending far more time on this than I did on GTA IV.