I had the same experience when doing the install to my Thinkpad. It prompted me about the installation of firmware-linux-nonfree, but, only activated the repos and didn't install the file. I don't know if this is a bug in the installer or a feature that lets you know you need the file. I guess the wording during the install could be modified. I only noticed that firmware-linux-nonfree wasn't installed when the new kernel came in and I saw it was still missing.
As far as the dual language forums, be patient. Since you've already recognized lost faces, you must remember the early sidux forums where the same information could be found in both the English and German forums. Since siduction was born from the aptosid.de community, it's expected that most of the posts would be in the German forums. It's only been a week since the RC was released, I expect that in the coming weeks the English forums will be as busy as the German ones, with most technical discussions shared equally. Until then, Google Chrome/Translate works (for me at least) fairly well for scanning the topics.