Technically it's called brute force versus elegance. If a realtime solution is found to be visually indistinguishable from a non-realtime solution, for all practical purposes it is virtually technically as good...
The subtlety of the English language, but my emphasis in the very sentances you quote was on
quality in regards to the image. It is pretty obvious to most of us that the PS3 will NOT be using offline rendering techniques as they take hours to render a single frame a GBs of data to store the shadows, texture assets, mesh assets, etc
It is granted they will use different techniques, so the question is will they attain the same technical quality. As you say
visually indistinguishable results on screen.
So back to my specific example: Apply your arguement to the UT2007 media, specifically the vehicles, with the KZ media. A glaring difference can be immediately spotted in the tires where the KZ media has extremely high poly assets whereas the UT media's
source media is equally high poly but the on screen image is composed of normal maps mimicking the source data yet show a significant visual differences and are by far technically inferior.
I am all far using render tricks to get the same results but with faster realtime methods. It doesn't matter if the mesh is completely loaded, or if you are tesselating HOS, or if you are using displacement maps to get the same result as long as it is the same visual quality. There are even cases where you can use parallax maps to make visually indistinguishable "poly data" (e.g. ATI has a nice demo where they put a hedge stone on the corner of building walls which prevents users from looking flush with the poly frame, preventing the illusion to be broken from the parallax map which indeed looked identical to the raw poly source the media was taken from... this is good use of art to prevent the illusion to be broken).
Obviously we all want to play games -- not slideshows -- so it is a given that the realtime techniques will win out over exponentially slower offline ones. We do, afterall, want to play games, not watch screens render.
But in regards to the point Ben was making (that UT2007's vehicles are as good as the KZ CGI vehicles) there is an absolute difference in the on screen visual quality.
And that was the point: Posters need to distinguish between the artistry and the visual quality when they say something is "as good, if not better, than CGI".