It's no more difficult to get an A4000 online than an A1200, in fact I'd say it's easier because you don't have to sacrifice your PCMCIA slot.
In my opinion, that was one of the best sacrifices. Having a network connection on my A1200 machines has increased their productivity an order of magnitude more than the old CD drive that was hogging that slot ever did. Now they can go online, access shares and other resources over the LAN, exchange files with each other without ever having to get floppy disks involved and have a safe place to back up stuff.
In fact, I don't miss optical media at all. I can use another machine's DVD if necessary. Every burnable update to OS4.1 for my PPC A1200 has been simply mounted using MountISO and the contents simply transferred to a spare bootable partition for local installation.
