I've been able to play a lot of cross platform games for the PS2 and the Cube and the Cube is superior in the graphics department. Higher framerate, deeper color in textures, and more texture detail becomes more than obvious when compared side by side in games like Nascar 2003, SRS racing, Everything or nothing, X-men legends, Medal of Honor, and many more. The difference is like night and day when you have a 32" HDTV and progressive scan output for both. There is the occasional port that isn't optimised and performes more pooly on the Cube, but that is few and far between.
And you can't really blame Nintendo as the sole culprit of character recycling, every manufacturer does it. Look at Sonic, Spyro, Crash, and a many others. Xbox has the luxury of no history to be compared to. I don't have much of a problem with Nintendo's new generation of recycled icons except for the fact that they STILL don't do voiceovers for their mario and pokemon games and fill them with the same incipid, repetitive dialogue thet they are famous for. Playing Paper mario would be much more enjoyable if they eliminated all the superfluous chatter like "you are the famous hero that I';ve always wanted to meet, arent you. well, that's great, let's now move on to the next part of the adventure, this is so great to be here in the lovely area with your majestic presence, blahdy, blady,blah." = translation: " Hi, you're mario, I'm a goomba, let's go find Peach." Who writes this stupid shit ? I expext more from $50 new release games. It's not that hard to pay some dufus to read a godamned script for a few hours and record them. They had an excuse because of lack of memory on the GBA and N64, but not now.
The major factor in the fact that the Gamecube is NOT underrated is that there is no online component to any of their games. I pay the same price for a GC game with basically the same features, but NO ONLINE PLAY versus the same game WITH online play for the PS2. Obviously the PS2 gives more value for the dollar. All that gameboy connectivity shit is just that, shit. I've hardly used any of it because they're basically just novelty items.