You make many a few fair points. I noticed all the effects you described (apart from GI) in the Rage demo, but they are quite hard to see, but they are definitely there. The skeletons you saw in the editor were textures, yes, but these dase (especially with displacement mapping) textures are a lot less 2D than they used to be. You could argue that the entire terrain generation system of Terragen is one big Displacement mapped texture. High polygon counts were certainly noticeable in the animated garageworker (I think he works in a garage) in the rage demo. They didn't mention the effects, but they are there.
" I'd say their engine boasts the most power and a lot of ease of use, but as has been said, we haven't seen much of it yet, and Unreal Engine 3 has the greatest flexibility and enough power for this generation, but not enough for ID tech 5's generation."
I say this because there were tons of effects shown in Rage, as well as Megatexturing, and it really is in a generation after the current engines. Like the Doom3 engine however, it will probably be the worst of the next gen engines, simply because it came out earlier. I'm starting to think John Carmack is working in his own slightly shifted timescale of generations compared to everyone else.
I've used the UE3 engine, and I must admit that i can only really base my experiences with Crytek with CryEngine 1, and the videos that I've seen, and while Crytek has always won hands down on exteriors, their interior editing was rather restrictive, whereas UE3 can manage both relatively easily.
I like to think of it as a scale, great exteriors on the left, great interiors on the right. Crysis is on the far left, ue3 is in the middle and the Doom3 engine would be a bit further to the right (I can't compare ID Tech 5, because I haven't seen them build an interior, or exterior - but as a guess I'd put it somewhere near the middle). I'd bet my money on the middle of the road engine doing better than the one that handles one aspect really well, but doesn't do so good on the other.
Of course when Crysis comes out I'd love to be proved wrong, and be faced with a wonderful and easy-to-use editor, but I can't see it happening yet. I don't think you'd find a 2D side-scrolling mod for Crysis.
As for licensees, I must admit to being a bit behind on who has licenced what, I'd completely forgotten about Prey being Doom3 and hadn't even noticed Crysis getting any licences, so for that I was entirely wrong.
I still stand by Unreal Engine 3 for being easiest to use, if only because I have used it and found it easy to use (their Kismet system - a graphical, node-based, method of creating scripted sequences without the need of a programmer - is just beautiful, especially for a terragener like myself). All we've really seen from Cryengine 2 is that it can make some very nice terrain, we haven't seen material editors, scripting editors, particle editors, etc. All of which you can not only see, but you can use for 15 bucks and a copy of steam.
btw. As for what calico said, yes I totally agree there is a lot of potential for procedural textures (although my Tb harddrive doesn't give a **** about texture sizes) and even procedural modelling. Roboblitz, an Unreal Engine 3 XBox Live Arcade game used procedural textures in order to reduce their filesize from around 800 meg to 50 meg, but even they had to use some artist-made textures, because not everything can be procedurally made, or at least, not easily procedurally made. Actually, I've used the software they used, it's the Mapzone 2 editor (which i mentioned on the file sharing area) and it is incredibly powerful, but not as powerful as a good artist with a wacom and photoshop. That's why I stand by my statement that when procedural generation is used to generate content that the artist can then edit, that is the ideal engine.