I am also interested in Sphere3 but I dont like the movement to exclusive hardware.

My wish-list would be:
- improved shadows (higher resolutions) without glow-coronas around models
- scene-management
- better lighting-system

If we had this then you could expect real games coming. Currently there is no Sphere game available because of this.

It does not have to be SM4.0 and I dont care about relief mapping, real displacement mapping, geometry deforming and such. This will be FPS-killer even with modern GPU. And a scene-management is still missing. So it makes all that even worse.