I said before the game ever came out on PC that I was going to be just fine with the same graphics as on console, but at 60fps. I would have been satisfied with that. Being able to play these 'console games' at a good framerate makes a massive difference for me. Anything else on top of that is just icing, as far as I'm concerned. Of course I wish developers did more, but unless you expect them to build PC versions from the ground up just for higher end hardware, then the more typical console port we see is going to be the norm, and it's understandable. Rockstar did a valiant job giving a huge range of options for PC players of all kinds, and optimizing the game so you didn't need some $2000 PC to play at 1080p/60fps. Hell, many people with very modest rigs could play at 1440p if they didn't mind 30fps.
They even did what I wish tons more would do, which is to not lock the UI/HUD to the main resolution, meaning you can turn the resolution up and not have the UI get all tiny and unusable. Small touch, but a huge difference for those of us with higher resolution monitors or who like to downsample.
It's very hard to ask for much more than what they've done here.
I agree with you, from what I've seen this is a great port and I might actually get the game for PC.
I just cringe when PC gamers glorify the PC to an extreme level when most of the improvments on PC, besides framerate, are for the most part, like you said, just icing on the cake.
It wasn't before the new consoles came out that I really saw how "behind" the PC actually is to realizing it's true potential.
We get a PS4 which has the hardware of an old PC by today's standards, and a mid-range one when it came out, and yet it puts out games like Driveclub, Infamous, Killzone, Bloodborne and the Order that visually blow anything on PC out of the water (before Unity and Ryse, which again came from the next gen consoles).
Even stuff like Crysis 3 seemed to be held back. It looks great but doesn't have half the impact of something like The Order or Infamous.
Only when next gen CONSOLES came out did we finally have a look at what actual "next-gen graphics" truly were, even though a PC could theoretically have done similar things much earlier, and COULD do MUCH better things now. But it doesn't, because it's always following behind the consoles, and so we just get the same graphics with some extra improvements.
Sorry for the ramble, it went a bit off-topic. Point is, I wish some big developer would actually do something like GTA5 from the ground up on PC so that we could actually see what today's PCs are capable of.
It pisses me off that we buy a graphic card that costs the same or more as a console and only get the sort of improvements being shown here. I'm not saying they aren't good ( specially framerate), but they could be so much more..