Sim flying vs Real deal

Ever since I got my hand at a copy of FS2004 and started trawling the myriads of related forums, one of the most fiercely discussed questions is "Could a simulation flyer land an airplane?"
The answer boils down to a definitive "maybe". Many people who declare themselves experts insist on the NO option, which in my opinion is not correct. The reasons for that are

1. Flight simulators have become quite sophisticated these days. The first ever that I saw was a demo application on my SGI Indigo II. It is really just a couple moving OpenGL Vertices, but at the time of its creation it must have had several jaws drop to the floor. Now with FS2004 and google maps overlays, you can do VFR flying by dead reckoning if your machinery is up to it power and resource-wise.
   
2. The fact that pilots occasionally use FS2002, FS2004 or (maybe) even FSX to refamiliarize themselves with certain procedures means that flight simulators have reached a certain level of realism, else they wouldn't do that.
3. It has been proven by experiments. Last year or the year before a German TV magazine ran an experiment with the help of Lufthansa's flight simulators. Most simflyers hit the deck in a less than common fashion, but some actually managed it with the plane perfectly servicable afterwards.
   

So it boils down to the conclusion, that in fact simflying has a good relation to the real thing, but it is still far enougth away from it to prevent people from thinking of themselves as real pilots. Some of the things to consider are :

• There are several simplifications in flight dynamics, if nothing else, for the fact that computing power is limited and cannot provide a realtime simulation of each and every physical parameter. Real pilots, who had their hands at a real Cessna 172 will most certainly agree that there's not a cats chance in hell a real C172 would take as much abuse and still stay in the air than Microsofts rendition of it.
  
• You cannot hurt yourself or others in the simulator. In my hundreds of hours in FS2004 I've done things that I would never try for real, like shooting approaches that more likely resembled a dive bombing rather than a stabilized approach. Since I'm currently flying in the far eastern end of russia, where runways with PAPI's let alone ILS's are a nonexistant luxury, I've done such a thing painfully recently, because I'm notoriously useless at judging a good glide path without any help but my eyeballs. Well, I'll have enougth time to practice the next days on many more runways in the middle of the siberian nowhere.
  
• There is no authorities. You can violate any rule in the book without losing your license, that you haven't had to acquire in the first place.
  

So with all these things considered, I'm enjoying the fact that I can pretend to be flying an airplane, but I am aware that I am everything but a pilot, an educated layman perhaps but nothing more, so if this blog should ever have any readers, feel free to lambast me if I'm talking aviation BS at any point :-)

During the last days I've traversed Canada's north and Alaska towards russias far end. Why that is, I will explain later today.

Cheers, and always keep your takeoff-landing ratio at 1:1