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It really depends on your specific building department. Requirements can and do vary from city to city.
Many Bay Area homes from the 60's are wired with a bare copper ground wire attached to each Junction Box. At one time it was common to buy a pack of UL listed ground pigtails to bond the grounded box to the ground screw of a grounded receptacle. Some higher end receptacles achieved a UL listed ground through a bonded receptacle mounting screw without need for the pigtail.
I don't know if I would go through the expense to rewire an entire house unless I was having a problem.
Adding GFCI's to outdoor locations and Bathrooms is a good move and you should be able to add a dedicated circuit or two with ground for your computer room, media center, etc.
My City allows adding GFCI receptacles even where no ground is present. The benefit of the GFCI is greater than not having one... grounded or not.
Have you experienced any problems or been limited with your present service?
as far as rewiring the house, it depends on the age of the system. i'm not speaking first-hand on this but from conversations with bay area EC's, but i'm told that most of the older homes in san francisco have the knob-and-tube method installed (pre- 1950). the insulation life span of that type of wiring, and that of most early cables (through the '60's), is only 50 years. your electrical contractor can make a good determination for you. i'd say less than 20% of older systems i work on can have their insulation rated as very good. as long as the insulation is safe there is no need to rewire, but i would recommend an insulation test that can identify problems buried in the walls.
also, the GFCI receptacles require no grounding conductor to operate, and are in fact code required on a two-wire circuit if you are installing grounding-type receptacles; otherwise you have to replace a non-grounding receptacle with a non-grounding type. in other words, if you've got two prong receps you can't install a 3 prong unless it is GFCI protected, and each receptacle must have a label identifying that it has no equipment grounding conductor. this is to prevent current on the circuit leaking onto the casing of an appliance and grounding through your body instead of returning on the grounded conductor (if you have a 3-wire it should return on the grounding conductor). the gfci detects the imbalance and cuts power to the circuit.
We just changed all of theoutlets in our former house to GFCI outlets. It did nto cost much and was eaasy to do. You can replace only the first outlet in any series circuit, but we replaced them all becuase we wanted to be able to turn off outlets not in use. We had loads of small children. You can get GFCI outlets really cheap at Harbor Freight, but you have to test them all. A lot are defective and you will have to return them. The same is true of Home Depot GFCI outlets though.
We just changed all of theoutlets in our former house to GFCI outlets. It did nto cost much and was eaasy to do. You can replace only the first outlet in any series circuit, but we replaced them all becuase we wanted to be able to turn off outlets not in use. We had loads of small children. You can get GFCI outlets really cheap at Harbor Freight, but you have to test them all. A lot are defective and you will have to return them. The same is true of Home Depot GFCI outlets though.
your receptacles are not wired in series. They may however be daisy-chained.
as for buying them from harbor freight, i try to stay away from cheap products like that. I like leviton smartlocks, but prefer the look and feel of P&S gfci's. I do not like Cooper devices. I did get a steal once on some GFCI's made by GX Electric at a supply house that is now out of business; they were $5 a piece and out of 500, less than 10 were defective. We used them in the el-cheapo spec homes.
I've never bought or come across a defective Hubbell gfci receptacle...
If reliability is important, you can't go wrong with Hubbell. It's the only GFCI I buy for the Hospital, both in clinical areas, staff lounges and kitchen.
i'm sure someone in my area sales hubbell, but i don't know who. i've never used their stuff; only seen them in the catalogs. Seems like one interesting product I saw in their hospital grade line was devices that had plug-in connectors you install at the rough, and then just snap them in during the trim. You ever use those?
Ultrarunner, I am looking for an electrician in SF and probably someone in Oakland would work in SF. I have a 1000 sf flat and need someone reasonable, decent, and licensed. Can you, would you refer your guy? (new to blogs so not sure if something like this is correct etiquette to ask?) thanks, Richard
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They may however be daisy-chained. 
