I have to admit, I'm more than a little disappointed that when I purchased the ES Anthology & put the Skyrim disc in the computer I found that I didn't purchase a game. No, I purchased a download code that I had to set up a Steam account to use, so they could spend hours downloading the game onto my computer.

I thought that there would be more on the disc.

Welcome to the future, where buying a physical copy doesn't mean anything.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1258133-installing-from-disc-instead-of-steam/

The disk should have the game content on it. You do need the code to validate the game once installed with Steam so you do need a Steam Account, but every retail disk for Skyrim came this way.

Steam does like to default to a download rather than use the disk to install, so you have to do the above linked procedure to make it use the disk.