These are very powerful machines, and they're not really being used to their potential - at least in the storytelling realm. What Infocom has done from the start is to simulate a universe and then tell a story from within that universe. Every game has had some level of improvement. But in the long run, as things progress and more of a mass market grows, you'll be reaching people who are looking for story . People are used to storytelling from other media, whether it's music, or movies, or books.
People look for stories.
There's more than just special effects. A lot of people thought after the Star Wars movies all you had to do was put in some fancy special effects. But if the movie was junk, and the story wasn't good and didn't pull you in, the special effects alone weren't enough. My sense is that the best thing to be doing is honing skills for telling stories interactively, and not wasting time on graphics technology that is going to be outdated anyway. In the long run, none of these technologies are what consumers are ultimately going to want.