I disagree that it's not creative. It's not like he took those original bits and used them whole cloth one on top of the other. He edited them, remixed how they were put together, stuttered them or restarted them or looped them in order to fit his vision of a new composition.

It's like saying that Bach, Beethoven, etc weren't creative because they didn't actually play their own music. The main difference is here he's taking what's been played already and making it into a new composition instead of making a new composition in a vacuum. Which may arguably be even harder, since you're limited by your source material.

Bah...if anything suggesting that only 53% of human beings living in the US are drooling morons is being generous. Or the world at large, for that matter.

Not true actually, I was talking to one of the Splash Damage guys at E3. He said that you can create your landscape however you like (Maya, whatever) and there are tools that they'll be releasing that will import that and create the MegaTexture based on that information. I didn't get into any deep discussion of it because 1) I am not an artist and 2) I was more interested in how ET:QW played than how they did the cool graphical crap that they did, but he seemed confident that people should be able to create their own MegaTextures without too much agony.