2000 didn't use any pathfinding for fire and police. Each station simply covered a certain area when it come to suppressing crime or fire. When it came to fighting disasters, the position of a station didn't matter. You could simply deploy police and firefighters wherever you wanted, instantly.

I don't know about the one long winding rail line being the best possible layout, but more realistic layouts worked very well. It's not surprising that a simulation can be gamed to work better with unrealistic layouts (e.g. search for "Magnasanti"), but a city simulator should work reasonably well with realistic layouts, even if it's not necessarily the best. Real cities surely aren't the best layout either.

This is correct. In SC2k, you can see the region of effectiveness police and fire stations have, the region is a circle surrounding each station. I don't remember the name of the tool, but in the tools palette thingy there is an option to show a map and then toggle the various information about crime, fires, health coverage, etc.

I don't remember this particular issue either, but I do remember that an optimal layout for one of the early games (it was either SC2000 or the one that came out for SNES at about the same time) consisted of small patches of roads, just large enough to join 3 zone types.

SimCity has always had its quirks like this, but I think this version really does take it to a new level.

It's always rewarded some fairly unrealistic layouts. Like I said, inappropriately rewarding certain weird layouts is much less important than inappropriately punishing normal ones. The former is only to be expected in any complex game, but the latter destroys realism.