Understand at last, that some of the main defining qualities of any CGI movie are going to be unreachable for quite a while for pure performance considerations. Number of lights, precision and quality of shading, texture resolution and sampling, antialiasing etc. are all dependent on the underlying hardware's bandwith, math precision, etc. and thus are all going to be limited for quite a while, even on the next-next generation of hardware.
In these fields, even 5 to 10 years old CGI hasn't been surpassed yet in realtime graphics; and most of the catching up in the looks has to do with better tools and more experienced artists, and not performance. For example the UT2K7 characters have been modeled with technology and workstations that just weren't available some years ago, and that is why they can look more detailed than, say, FF8's CG characters. Back then, Square's artists haven't had machines with 2GB of RAM and 3GHz processors and fast OGL graphics, and neither were the 3D apps as advanced and easy to use as for example Zbrush (used heavily by Epic and others).
I think that by now, we've seen a good amount of what to expect from the nextgen games, and the rest will be about putting it all together; like getting MGS or Halo enemies look like FN3/NBA2K6 characters instead of the PD0 ones, or upping the levels to PGR3 quality, and so on... There's of course a lot of room left, but don't expect developers to overcome the strict quality limits of the hardware.
