No, it's not bullshit. That's a direct feed screenshot.
That said, what you're getting at without actually realizing it is the factor of view distance and display type.
The type of display you use combined with the distance from which you sit can increase or decrease your perception of visual artifacts. I can admit that, from my normal viewing distance on a good plasma, the game looks better than those screenshots suggest. That has no bearing on what the system is actually outputting.
This is why image quality tends to be more important on the PC front - most people play PC games in front of an LCD monitor. Sitting that close to an LCD display is the most difficult of situations for managing good image quality, I've found. You need better anti-aliasing and higher resolutions to compensate for the viewing distance and display type.
As a reverse example try playing a game on a nice CRT PC monitor. You'll find that higher resolutions suddenly become less useful due to the nature of the display. 1024x768 with 4x MSAA on a CRT looks absolutely super smooth and clean. It's really quite striking, really, just how different it looks.
Still, when analyzing the visual output of a game one must place all platforms on a level playing field. Analyzing output from a system on a monitor against PC output is the only way to understand how they compare.
That said, in the case of BFH, the shimmering and sub-pixel artifacts visible on thin objects are bad to the point that you'd have to stand a good 20 feet away not to be bothered by them. :\