They just released the complete pack of the 3rd set of alt costumes for SFIV. I was going to buy it. I know a lot of people who were. And like you said it's pretty over-priced.
In my opinion he's not talking about games with high fidelity graphics. He's talking about games with realistic graphics. Most of the games you just listed are very stylised and not supposed to look realistic, but there is plenty of graphics technology and detail being utilised.
"The grind" is created by the fact that in order to level or attain items, grinding is necessary. To avoid the grind, the objective needs to be something other than these things. This grind or making everything really absurdly hard and trial and error-ish ahd having rewards that are always the same are the only way to stretch out the content of an MMO so that people will spend so much time playing them without the grind.
@DoctorDynamite: What do you mean by 1st gen tech exactly? I'm actually curious. I don't know a lot about the technical basis of this OS. Seems quite different to previous versions to me, though.
@Moonchilde: This. Smash Bros. Melee looks so awesome smooth in 480p60. So many HD console cames run at 20-30fps and at 720p with really bad screen tearing issues. I want 1080p60 on everything standard for the next generation of consoles.