Having now finished it, and spent some time contemplating what I had just experienced, I think they give it all due credit. There's not a single game I've ever played that pulled me into it like this one.

No innovation? That's a bit simplistic. The very fact that they were able to incorporate various aspects of good-gaming into one single experience is all the innovation one can ask for. The near seemless movement from action, to cinimetic, back to action combined with free-camera and fixed-camera positioning created a very believable experience that pulls one straight into the story. Their ability to put pre-generated action into the game as if it was spontaneous is near genious. It's so good that often times the player is not even aware that it's just happened. This goes on throughout the entire game.

The combination of lighting and environmental effects on top of excellent graphics turned the visual experience into an absolute wonder. It was non-stop eye-candy.

There were no dull-moments, there was no case of repetition (aka Mass Effect), there were no long, drawn out cut-scenes (aka MGS) that removed you from the experience. Everything flowed and the pace/timing were spot-on.

You make it sound like they just pieced together a few aspects of other games and put little effort into this work. Your statement above should be considered a complete slap-in-the-face to the large number of designers/artisits/programmers/etc that spent years working on this game. Nothing is that easy, especially something that turns out as wonderful as this game is.

It deserves the accolades because it is that good, and because they've accomplished with near perfection what other good games have tried to do but to a much lesser extent (ie: GoW).

Right now, without hesitation, I can say it's the single greatest gaming experience I've ever had from a single-player title.