Second question, what gives with defining "toys" to so consistently mean "branded icons from franchised fiction?"
This is precisely what I kind of hate about yuppie culture. You can't have a model railroad, you have to have Thomas The Tank Engine. You can't play with your mom's broomstick and be a wizard, you need a Nimbus 2000 (no, wait, make that a 3000). It goes on and on, and even toys that used to have malleable generic purposes by design, like LEGO, need to be branded and defined and limited and explained and attached to some existing, trademarked, copyrighted, closed universe of predefined meaning.
There's nothing wrong with having a bit of this, sure. I have nothing against a couple Transformers or GIJOEs or Barbies or whatever. But if anything those kinds of toys should be "a sometimes food" for the imagination, and certainly not an all consuming obsession.
What kids need most of the time are real toys, the opposite of these sorts of things. Some blank pages to color on, some simple building blocks, a train that doesn't necessarily "go" anywhere...a racetrack whose races haven't already been run.
If there's a nostalgia to be had for something "lost" in youth, that's where it lies for me...not about anything I've lost, but rather what today's kids are having stolen from them before they even have a chance to miss it.