"Toy Story anyone"
The lesson to be learned there, SantaCruzer, is to stop quoting comments out of context years after they were said. The original comment was about the PS2 having the ability to render character models of Toy Story quality, saying nothing about rendering entire games at Toy Story quality. It was still not the most prudent comment to make, but nothing that would have misled anyone with enough sense to read and retain the entire context of the comment, rather than just fixate on the words "Toy Story" to the exclusion of everything else.
Besides, some learned the lesson you're talking about a generation earlier, after being fooled by SGI renders of FF characters for the Ultra 64!
I do agree that its healthy to hold some reservations here. I'm personally on the fence about how possible that Madden render is as part of a real-time game engine. As others have pointed out, you've got to scale what you see there to encompass many other player models, refs, sidelines, field, stadium, audience, etc. There's got to be a general visual consistency to the entire presentation, otherwise the overall effect would be jarring, i.e. player models that look like that, but everything else looks like something from this gen.
There's also seemingly a disparity between the football render and the car render in terms of visual detail applied. We're seeing individual blades of grass in the football pic but the trees in the car pic look to have no more individually rendered leaves than this gen. The textures in the football pic seem of much higher quality than the one's in the car pic. The road texture in particular is nothing that we haven't seen this gen for example. Lighting and reflections look very nice, but that's a rather incremental improvement over this gen. Still, must admit that the amount of jpeg artifacts in those pics makes it hard to make an accurate judgment.