On the other hand, you have studios like Bethesda - who build great games with incredible gameplay... but graphics performance so sluggish that it really takes away from the experience, not to mention buggy and crashy as hell.
There's room on both sides to improve. IMHO Valve is the best at this - their games run on an incredible range of hardware and look good on just about anything. Their engine is also rock solid to boot.
My point was only that there are many ways to fail when achieving "graphical perfection" is included among your goals for a game. Performance sucks, the world is shrunken, gameplay and story suffer; these are just examples. As always, "something's gotta give" and when you decide it can't be graphics, things that are far more core to the game experience end up on the chopping block.
There's room on both sides to improve. IMHO Valve is the best at this - their games run on an incredible range of hardware and look good on just about anything. Their engine is also rock solid to boot.