It seems a bit odd (from a layman's point of view) that the developers would go to the effort of making something that looks as nice as it does in the screenshots only to remove it because of "performance problems". If you think of the level of detail in a game like Crysis; when it was released there was hardly a computer in existence that could run it at the sort of fidelity that had been suggested in pre-release media but ultimately the option was there.
As PCs became more powerful they were able to utilise the quality the developers had managed to create and new computers could 'grow in to' features that had previously been too demanding on the computer - wouldn't that be a logical situation with SSE as well?
I think it's great that (by the sounds of it) Vstep have given people with low-medium spec computers the means to play the latest version of the simulator but there are people on both ends of the PC-power spectrum.
Either way, graphics aren't everything; I haven't been able to get a serial key sorted yet after my purchase but I'm looking forward to firing the game up, cranking up all the settings and getting out on to the open seas. Got the ol' eye-patch ready