Scaling does need to exist, Source engine does scale amazingly well... looking at Steam hardware surveys you can see the number of people running high-end cards is low... if Valve released a game that couldn't run on anything lower than an 8800GTX, they would be cutting off 80% of their users.
I think focusing on scaling is just about the best think Crytek can do. I haven't heard much about Cryengine 2.5/3, or wtfever it is, since I saw the tech demo when it was released, so I don't know how well it scales. At the time though, it seemed to me that they were trying to keep Cryengines graphics on the same level for PC gaming, while being able to automatically scale it back for consoles and maintain a decent amount of eye candy. I'm sure this would also translate into some low requirement medium settings on the PC.
Being able to release a game that can stress the PC enthusiasts hardware, while keeping the mainstream pc gamers happy, and be released on consoles seems to me like what gaming companies should be shooting for at this point. If CryEngine comes with the tools to automatically do this type of scaling, I'm pretty damned excited.
And BTW, I've never really thought of Crytek as the maker of Crysis. I think they will do far better as the maker of CryEngine, and last I heard there was a bunch of game companies that showed interest in using the engine. Let Crytek supply the tools and let other companies handle the storyline. If you ever used Sandbox 2, you know what I mean.