I know what you're saying but it's not what its meant to be understood from this. The main topic here is quality. Everyone knows how polished and top quality WoW is, even WoW haters know this, and most of them hate the fact that very few companies can keep up with the level of quality WoW has and everyone now expects.

Like the author says: "he discussed how players expect a set of established standards that WoW has provided. Be it a sense of completion of polish, a game mechanic, core concepts, or even art direction and fluidity of art theme, World of Warcraft set the bar very high for other game developers and even Blizzard itself."

The big problem is, like you said, when these standards lead to cloning WoW (Runes of Magic and RIFT comes to mind), even if they have their unique systems (like RIFT's Soul System). THAT is not a good a idea, and this is where I think NCSoft stands apart with Guildwars 2. NCSoft is a smaller company than Blizzard, but they have pretty high standars too and a great degree of polish. Their storytelling is pretty good and character design is amazing. They can not only live to the high standards established by WoW, but they're also bringing in (so far) something completely new. THIS is a good idea, and NOT cloning WoW.

Every site out there (except this one, thank god) is reporting "BioWare admits that TOR is a WoW Clone"... that's not a good idea either.