Well, a generational leap sometimes doesn't feel like enough of a difference until you cross over, but then you look back and can't believe what you thought used to be "good enough". (I remember when PS1/Saturn was coming out and magazines were saying that the games were all the same as on 16bit but just done in 3D...)
I would recommend you look at NVIDIA's new Marbles at Night demo:
Not only does this look great, obviously (and the new Night version of Marbles is even prettier than before), but this doesn't have any of the baked effects that you're used to; they say everything is path-traced. So, you can see the lighting, you can see surfaces picking up that lighting from different surfaces, you can see the glows dimly brighten a few nearby objects, you can see reflections in mirrored surfaces, you can see the bright hit of a light source, you can see the directionality of global illumination playing across the full area as it pans the scene, you can you can see the shadowing, you can see the reflections, you can see the shininess... and moreover, you cannot see the fake effects that you're used to for creating a similar type of scene on a current-gen platform, because those fake effects are not there*. And that's what we're going to get used to, in the future. And when we get to this level of accuracy and simulated presence of reality, we will probably see the seams and flaws and cheats of what we're used to, and the difference will be a generational divide.
(*I say the traditional techniques of lighting and shading are "not there", but I'm sure somebody technical can school me on what NVIDIA is and is not pulling off in this demo.)