I gotta agree with Onedreamer. I just started playing at Prince level and I find I cannot waste time on the Pyramids. I have too many other fish to fry that early in the game: warrior/settler combinations for my initial land grab, workers, military units to fend off both barbarians and the AI opponents, libraries to both expand my cultural borders and increase my tech rate (obelisks are obsolete too quickly)...
In the early game, I don't have nearly enough specialists to take advantage of Representation and not nearly enough gold to take advantage of US. Hereditary Rule is available fairly early in the game and since I typically need 3-4 units in most of my cities just to keep the other AIs from attacking me, it works just fine.
I'd like to build the Oracle for the CS slingshot, as the AIs get an quite a head start tech-wise, and that would help me catch up in a big way. I still haven't managed it at Prince level, but I'm going to keep trying. Someone usually completes the Oracle before me, but getting some extra gold, founding Confucianism, and having early access to courthouses aren't bad as consolation prizes.
Anyway, what it's really about is what Sid calls "a series of interesting choices". Certain strategies that work for some will not work for others, mainly because they simply don't suit your style, personality, experience, etc. But after seeing one player's account of winning a game on Monarch without building a single military unit, I'm convinced that in a game this wonderfully complex, you can make almost any strategy into a winning strategy.