I think procedural textures are definitely something to look at in cases where space is at a premium. It worked well on Roboblitz because that was back when Microsoft had the 50 MB cap on games, and making a 50 MB Unreal Engine 3 game is extremely non-trivial, let me tell you! It may also come to work quite well on the large, sandbox games like GTA where there are huge limitations on how much detail any one object can have since you are rendering an entire city.
It's not going to take off, though, although some middleware developer comes out with a solution that emphasizes speed and most importantly ease of creation. Math scares most artists and most sane people.
