The truth is in the middle of what you all wrote. These polygon counts mentioned (3-6 thousand per animated model) are values from old games like Doom 3 (published on 3rd August 2004). This game even supported old graphic cards with shader model 1.x.
In the meantime there were games (like some Tomb Raider games) where the main hero (Lara Croft) came with more than 10 thousand polygons. Today some have even more than the double amount. The latest Lara Croft has more than 30 thousand polygons with all clothing attached:
http://www.planetlara.com/underworld/article0015.aspBut still they can look like they are made out of a few millions of polygons if you add normal maps generated from high polygon models. Even the old Riddick game showed this perfectly:
In the end this depends on your game and the target platform. If you have only one character then it is another story as if you want to render a dozen of them on screen close to the camera. And another fact to keep in mind is how fast the skinning and animation performs. If lots of polygons have to be skinned to a bones-skeleton each frame and if this works single-threaded on CPU then it might slow the game down.
