Unreal seems to be making these things easier to achieve through tooling for games, where I feel Unity is just trying to point out that you could still reach this level of fidelity if you wanted to, like you said.

I think if I were to start a high fidelity project with a big team, I'd start seriously considering the art pipeline benefits you're getting from Unreal. It looks like they're trying pretty hard to take some of the tedious work out of lighting and setting up LODs, which could be a big time savings.