So these criticisms exist, but you'd suppose he'd already have tested on the 1080 tv, maybe even a 4k tv. No way it'll look as nasty as that blurry Megaman, and if it does, you have to wonder why this information wasn't brought to his attention before long before production.
I tried it myself in Photoshop. Keep in mind the "AVS" examples are just theoretical until people actually get the console and see for themselves.
I downloaded a
MMX sprite, confirming its the native size, and scaled it several different sizes with bilinear or nearest neighbor filtering.
Bilinear scaling from 240p does actually yield similar results to that blurry Mega Man, but this isn't accurate because the AVS is starting from a clear 720p output. So disregard the 3X Bilinear and 4X Bilinear images... they're more representative of what the 240p NESRGB would look like on a HDTV without the aid of XRGB or OSSC.
So starting from the clean 3x Nearest upscale representative of AVS at 720p, I rescaled it to the 1080p and 4K equivalents with bilinear filtering (common for the internal scalers in most displays). 1080p is subtly but still noticeably blurry. 4K is very blurry, though thankfully not as bad as I initially suspected. But it's important to remember that these are best case scenarios... Photoshop has excellent resizing capabilities whereas your TV's scaler may not.
I did receive the Hi-Def NES yesterday and did a quick comparison on my 1080p Panasonic plasma. Games in 720p scaled to 1080p are a little blurry, resembling the theoretical AVS 720p to1080p example in the picture above. Hi-Def NES at 1080p (4x integer scale) is pixel-perfect sharp... also like in the above pictured example.
The 4K upscaler image is a just-for-fun example of a future 4K-capable Framemeister or a 4K display with an excellent internal scaler.