It is no longer the important figure it was when the PS2 came out. With the integration of technologies like Normal Maps and displacement maps, devs could trick the user into thinking there was more geometry at play then there actually is. New technologies continue to come out that help this along. Also, shaders (pixel and vertex) have become a very important part of the process with DirectX 9 finally giving the needed flexibility...so nowadays, the shader processing power of a chip is almost just as important to how many polygons it can push.