LOL
There has always been this sort of conundrum with PCs. The DM maybe wants to make his game world seem nice and consistent and thus reasons "well, humans are the major race, everything is basically like medieval Europe except off at the edge of the map someplace are all these weird races." The players OTOH go through the PHB and think to themselves "why would I want to be just an ordinary everyday human, it is much cooler to play one of these other races." And you almost certainly will, in any campaign, end up with a party made up mostly of members of exotic races.
Of course humans are good choice for a PC in terms of game balance, but that will never make up for the 'coolness factor' of non-humans. Naturally it only gets more extreme with more play. At first people are satisfied playing an eladrin or a dwarf. After a while that gets old hat and they want to play a drow. After a while that too will get old hat and they will want to play a troll or a dragon or some new made up race.
Given that the goal of the game designers is to sell games and make money, they WILL inevitably add more and more exotic options for PCs, because that is the material players will pay money for. Even if it doesn't lead to power creep, it will always lead to more 'race creep'.
There are a few things you can do in campaign design if it bothers you. First you could simply set your campaign in some very exotic locale, like a large cosmopolitan city where 'all the races of the world can be found', or a dimensional nexus. Second you could try to restrict players choices of race, but you'll have to make the existing choices more interesting for them. Third you could use the old "we don't serve your kind here" sort of thing where you just penalize people for odd race choices using story elements, but that is hard to do in a way that isn't unfun.
Frankly I think it is just an inevitable consequence of the nature of the game. Just like the fact that PCs are always going to end up vastly more powerful than any normal person would be.
I have to agree though, that particular piece of artwork isn't maybe going to go down in history as one of the better illustrations in
4e. Still, compared to the artwork that TSR products generally had, even the worst stuff in
4e is pretty good...
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