Concerning the art workflow: I am working on a new sci-fi texture set. And this time I model every texture as a high poly model in Modo. Then I bake normal map, height map and ambient occlusion map into a single plane. This is very easy in Modo, it can be done with a single click for each of them.

And I can assure you: With a tool like Modo it is exactly the same speed as when I painted them in a 2d tool (The GIMP). Sometimes it is even faster and more simple. Actually I also just paint some objects only in 3d.
So I don't agree that creating art became more slow this way. But we need more sophisticated tools to do so.

Here is an image how it looks in C4 engine with parallax and horizon mapping:

http://www.firma-geppert.de/Gamedev/Images/scifi2/c4_wall_hor.jpg



And here is another image with good old normal mapping applied:

http://www.firma-geppert.de/Gamedev/Images/scifi2/pipes.jpg



The same maps would be perfect for displacement mapping in DX11, the underlying polygons just need the right resolution for tesselation. I watched this in the Heaven demo and they carefully built each geometry with an evenly distributed polygon flow.