A lot will depend on what you are shooting. With the 20D you will get over 200 RAW pictures on the 2gb and 400 on the 4gb. If you are shooting sports in wet weather you might want to take more than 200 shots without opening your camera to change the CF card.
I do a lot of winter shooting in Canada so I prefer the Extreme for its cold weather abilities. In Syndey you might be more interested in hot weather reliability.
I don't worry about CF card failure. I have had two cheap CF cards fail and none of the better quality cards. For the cards that did fail I was able to recover the pictures up to the time of failure so I did not lose any images. I even recovered the top 1/2 of an image where one card failed. I do recommend carrying several cards, regardless of size in case one does fail.
For that reason, I would prefer two 2gb cards to one 4gb card, but two 4gb cards would be even better. If you are going to worry about card failure, don't shoot each card until it is full, but keep rotating cards throughout the day so you have a good selection of images on both. Even better, get the 1DMk2 and shoot on both CF and SD cards at the same time.
Even if you had sixteen 256mb cards and one failed there is a chance that the image your really wanted was on the card that failed. Either that or you would be busy changing cards when the time came to take that perfect image.
Scott