On my install I notice grid view is now 2 column and when clicking into the sub-forums via forum - index - category (Where we can see all the forums in the category listed in one spot) that this pages grid blocks are now each to single row. Is this correct?

if this is correct personally I liked the 3 column so much more, a little more scroll to the action now.

It depends on the viewport of your browser, presence of the sidebar, etc. Here for example, I see this:

 

I've been working on transferring themes from a 7a install and it still has 3 rows Ryan  as it has throughout all 8 betas and the same with sub-forums. My RC1 install is different. I tried clearing my caches and still the same  interesting