I was playing Dead Space 3 a few nights ago (720p upscaled) on my 55 inch 1080p TV about 12 feet away and it looked absolutely amazing. Same with the 720p The Last of Us.

I would take 720p The Last of Us over any next gen 1080p launch game and probably beyond any day. 720p upscaled is just fine and will be for 99% of those who buy the upcoming consoles this generation. Of course you have you minority that will say otherwise........

You are missing the point. 720p is 720p in any platform.

If it looks beautiful on PS3 it shall look beautiful on PS4.

For some reason some devs couldn't get their games to run 1080p on X1, unlike 2K and many others.

So whoever has a gaming rig that can play 4k games natively (let's suppose) can't enjoy a game on their rig that runs at 1080p right now.

42"
no great perceptual diference yet.

I think they should do it optional.
If you want 1080p, choose 1080p, but maybe the frames could down a little, if you want steady 60 FPS, you can choose 720p.

720p will be sufficient for a long time. But that's just it, sufficient, minimal, just satisfactory, make do at best. Now granted that 720p in itself is great. But more is always nicer.

It all comes down to the distance from you're tv and the size of the tv in question.

If you have a large tv or are close to your console like I am then the 1080p is definitely a benefit to the gaming experience.

Given that the difference is already noticeable in games I would venture a guess that the best looking games from Sony will look much better than the best looking games from Microsoft.

Just cant wait to see what Naughty Dog's next game will be.

720p is getting a lot of love here..this would not be the case if this was N4G..

Ha, I just laughed at the thought of high end GPU's rendering games in 720P, shit would look so realistic. If only the Xbone or PS4 had a R290X in it!

1080p is a must for me if I'm going to buy a PS4 or Xbox One. Even my Wii U plays lots of games in 1080p already. 720p doesn't look bad on my plasma TV though, it's great at scaling the image, even from 480p it doesn't look pixelated that much. On my brothers LED tv though, anything below 1080p looks horrible.

But 480p didn't stop me from enjoying Skyward Sword, even though I would love to play it again in 1080p after I saw the Dolphin videos on youtube.

Absolutely.
Unfortunately, it doesn't end at 720 vs 1080.

What everyone seems to be missing is that 1080 on multiplats confirms a major hardware difference between the consoles.
This basically says, OK when a ps4 game needs to be 720, what will have to be removed from the one to keep it inline? FPS? enemies on screen? Detail levels? particles? What if a game taxes ps4 so much that it runs in 720 at 30fps??
Surely this is obvious to everyone, just as obvious it should be that while multiplats will try to restrain the differences, on first party games, the difference between consoles will be more than noticeable.

Sigh I fully agree with you that a good looking game will look good regardless of resolution (heck I think skyrim on enb looks better than what I've seen in next gen launch games). Case in point, visual appeal is up to one's own interpretation and even that is beside the point to what I was sayihng.

 X1 claims power parity with PS4 but from what's coming out from multiplats, such claim is becoming more and more questionable. Sure you can argue that devs aren't competant enough to realise xbox potentials etc but that's just a base to turn and twist the argument further, the other party can claim the same. No good is what's something is theoratically capable of if it isn't capable in practice.