I have to agree with amy here. At my (humble) mind Ortucis and Lostclimate watch this discussion from a wrong point of view.

I see it that way: If you have little budget, as a small studio or hobby-developer, you will not earn much with a game. You need to be fast and efficiently. You have to create small games, casual games, nice ideas. I formerly used to program games in Delphi and I finished most of my Windows 2d games at a weekend. I sold each game for a few hundreds of bucks to a publisher and this was fine. It would not work if it takes years to finish such small games.

And this is the area where the indie license of Unity makes sense. You get it and you make small nice games for iPhone, Windows, Mac. The price is a no-brainer. You can get much more money back.

But if you really want to make a 3d-game with great shadows, shaders, fantastic lighting, then you have to pay a bit more in the Unity department. This makes sense because you also have to pay a lot more for artwork, game develoopment. You will spend much more time on your project, several years, for sure.

But to be honest: If you really want to go this eye-candy way, then I would suggest to use C4. It is even much cheaper than Unity Pro and just looks better, has a visual shader editor, better light sources and a better scene-management especially for indoors.

So we should see it in a more realistic way: Unity as well as Gamestudio is not a id-Tech 3d shader engine at the graphical edge. C4 is a better choice then. But C4 needs more investment in programming time. So if you want to make small games faster then Unity is just the better bet, scripting, the fastest art-workflow and the most platforms available for your game. Actually this is the technology for small indies to grow bigger, for realistic projects.
If you are a dreamer then better get you Torque3d or C4. Both can be used to create very good looking scenery if you have the arts behind it. But at the end you need much time and a big team for a complete project.

So every technology has its place and we should not beat it down.
Lite-C as an example is a good starting point for pupils or students with no budget at all and with no knowledge of C++ (if they had then they could go with free alternatives like Irrlicht / Ogre without any feature cut at all).

Edit: By the way - I found it interesting that Ortucis as someone who uses Max 2009 and Mudbox has a problem with such a cheap price of Unity
These 2 tools are 20 times more expensive than Unity indie.