In the interests of full disclosure let me say that the majority of what I've seen about 4e seems ill suited to my preferred gaming style. I'm also not a big fan of 3.x, my group tends towards home brewed systems and heavily house ruled variants. That having been said...
For me the issue isn't one of the game being "realistic" per se, but rather one of the consistency of the model produced by the rules as it regards the players expectations. That's a bit convoluted, but if you'll bear with me for a bit I'll try to explain.
The points raised earlier in the thread about minion hp and kobold armor speak to the central issue, in my opinion. Many years back a player in my group was running a dwarven warrior/smith, and after clearing a small cave of kobolds that were threatening the local cattle population, he decided to cart up their armor and weapons and take it back to the town with him. He planned to melt it down and use the metal for something more useful, even if it was only patching up cookware or making horseshoes and plowshares for the locals. He reasonably predicted that the metal in the armor would behave as the other metal in the setting. That it would melt or soften under the right temperatures, and could then be molded or reshaped. After all, someone had to forge it in the first place, right?
In my experience players have a pre-existing idea that the "game world" operates in the broad strokes much or exactly like the real world with specific exceptions. Orcs exist, there is magic, dragons can fly non-magically despite physics, and so on, however, gravity still pulls objects "down", water is still wet, fire is still hot, force still equals mass times acceleration, you get the point.
It goes further than this, however. Players expect even the "exceptions" to the real world to behave analogously to "similar" things in the real world outside of their narrow exceptions. For example, they will accept that a griffin can fly, as that is included in the "exception", but they expect it to eat, eliminate, sleep, and in all other ways behave as a "mundane" animal of its size would. They expect that it must eat a lot, due to its mass, that it would need a large territory in which to gather its food, that its hide or fur could be used to produce certain goods, and that if they sever its head it will die. They believe that if no particular exception in the rules is made for these behaviors, and the griffin still behaves otherwise, it becomes "unrealistic"... and if we use the word as they do, they're right.
The minion issue causes similar trouble. When fighting Orgdul the Unclean, orc shaman of The Crawling One, the party also faced 8 members of the Bloody Fist, a militant order of orcs devoted to The Crawling One. In that situation the 8 orcs were minions, and one successful attack was enough to shuffle them off this mortal coil. Now the party is watching from concealment as the last two orcs between them and freedom keep watch over the temple's rear gate. Remembering how easily those other non-shamanic orcs fell, they charge the guards... but these orcs are brutes, not minions, this miscalculation could cost them dearly. Now how were they to know the difference? Unless there is some kind of visible minion tag, was their assumption really unreasonable? If the shaman would have sent one of his underlings to fetch him some wine, and the PCs met him in the corridor, is he still a minion, or does he revert to being a "real" orc absent his cohorts and master? How does the player reasonably know this?
Players approach the game from a kind of naive rationalism and rules that run contrary to that would seem, to me, to serve only to inhibit the player's ability to estimate the potential outcomes of their character's actions. If they can not do this dependably, then their interaction with the game will be stunted, and they will gravitate towards the most basic of interactions. In the context of D&D this is probably kill thing/take stuff. Your view on this depends heavily on your style of play. It may be that for a given hypothetical group playing a game with a like minded hypothetical DM this is an optimal solution.
None of those hypothetical people are me.
Just my take on the "realistic" issue.
Happy Gaming.
