If I cut down a 50 foot tall tree with a swiss army knife, it would not be a testament to the "power" of the knife, it would be a testament to my own stupidity.
The recent "X in pure CSS" theme is important as it shows how advanced CSS3 is. They are tech demos, which as we know are often not meant to be anything more than that. They display how far you can bend CSS and nothing more. Just like the Blendtech ads, if someone cut down a tree with a pocket knife in an afternoon I bet 1/2 of us would run out to buy that knife.
If an artist had done this using more standard tools and rendered it as SVG no one would care. I think you've completely missed the point.
edit: It seems that psadauskas made this point some time ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1428943
However, "look what I can do in CSS3" is always fun to see, because it introduces techniques not necessarily just the technology.
Perhaps we can have a small image maker took which generates html5 vs an image.
Now that is great and all and is probably a really nice experiment into doing stuff with CSS, but this is a tiny fraction of what CSS can do being used, but practically, an image takes less memory/cpu to render.