Pure: yeah, yeah, the art side... totally agree with only a shade: having more power means the software can have niftier apps and presets... meaning the user can be more brutish and still produce something worth looking at...

Vlad:
download https://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/index.html
have you played Farcry at max options? true, it is unplayable no matter what machine and true it isnt photorrealistic (but as close as it gets with todays hard, engines and game artists...)
and this days gamecards demos dont have much to envy to a steven stahlberg´s pic,

in fact todays gpus have more processing power (and specialliced on doing its thing) than todays cpus and they keep shrinking components size and growing die size like theres no tomorrow (power consumption starts to be big issue with the nvidias 6800U. they eat more than the processor... and when the quadro version is out and the renderviews of the apps take advantage of it, and i can get my hands on it :watermouth

i mean what i said: i think the realtime quality capabilites is also starting to go exponential instead of linear and i believe the capability of the eye to discern fake from true images is fixed at a very lower treshold than the level needed to accurately model it.
combining both beliefs it follows that power will be available (at farthest)in the next decade