Yeah, I'm pretty sure if my squadmates bugged and their abilities stopped doing anything I wouldn't even have noticed anything but the departure of my overpowered healing from Cora (w/ the exception of Drak, I guess, because he tends to kill everything around him pretty quickly). I played on normal (I was not up to dying with any regularity, given the weird the save system), though, and the combat became stupidly easy pretty early on, so perhaps they're more essential for higher settings.
I'm not one who really cared that much about the streamlining of the squad combat in ME:A (squad tactics was never what I enjoyed about the earlier games, and I never found the systems that interesting), but it's indisputably true that removing player control over squadmates' powers makes them feel like afterthoughts.
