you can have you 4A.
well if you had read this thread there is no way to get 4 amps out of a channel, it peaks max at 3 for under 100us with thermal management which is going to be next to impossible on a flat pack smd
No surprise about the 2A issue...that's just pure marketing. Without a big heatsink and/or a fan the L298 is limited by heat, not current. In a recent test on an L298-based motor driver product, we found that it goes into thermal shutdown at 1.24A on a single channel (other channel is off) or about 0.8A when both channels are on.
although it may just be enough to fit the op's requirement
on a side note I hate that people have to go hunt down information on their site, this time it was in the comments, when I got my pic32 I ended up searching though 14 pages of forums to find out I needed to download a modified program uploader to get the durn thing to work