Quote -
               "you are talking about less than 2 seconds to "render" the viewport. Perhaps less! Add anti-alias and your frame render rate goes perhaps to 4-5 seconds."

do you have any examples of this..seem like a pretty basic way of rendering as your missing out on lighting & all the material effects,personaly I could never render like that,
I could render a preview like that..but with a preview I dont really care how the bumps look

the real time shadow display in max2008 coupled with dx shaders is indeed good,& that's the kind of real time effect that will aid me in creating images

if your into very speedy realtime rendering..have you looked into using game engines?using Cryengine I can render normal,displacement,sss,ambient occlusion,reflection,soft shadows etc..all in real time :)
the engine comes with the game Crysis & you can get it for less than the price of Poser

 

I don't understand what you mean by missing out on materials and lighting effects.  Preview already shows approximate diffuse and specular values, with regard to scene lights.  There's already an option to use the GPU to more closely approximate transparent and procedural materials.  What I think a number of us would like to see added to preview would be bump/normal maps and cast shadows.  This is mostly an animation thing, as long per-frame render times are more acceptable for high-res stills.  In the end it comes down to what you are trying to do, but for animators working independently being able to use our GPUs to instantly render graphics of the quality of Gears of War or Ratchet and Clank: Future would be a great time saver and in many cases all we'd need to produce acceptable visuals, especially in non-photoreal styles.