I agree with you 100%. I don't understand the contempt for Crysis either. The game looks absolutely phenomenal and it's no surprise that it performs how it does, if anything, a consistent 40 FPS on medium/high settings is great considering the visuals. Everything is high res, the amount of detail is staggering not to mention soft shadows cast by and received by absolutely every single object in the game. It's not unreasonable to expect that a game that looks this good is going to crush even the most powerful systems. It's not like games haven't done this in the past either. Doom 3 anyone?
As for the topic at hand, I'm going to go ahead and say that if there has ever been a reason to upgrade, Crysis is it. Possibly not at this moment in time, but as soon as the new cards from ATI and nVidia are available I know I'll be upgrading. It's a fantastic game, but I guess it depends how you play it. You can play it from start to finish in a straight line, becoming aggravated by the performance, or you can suck it up, drop some settings and just have fun.
Crysis on all high does not look impressive to me, I have to use CFG's to make it look amazing.