Nobody gets fired for licencing Unreal. The saying used to be "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" I think.
Anyway, I'm not going to support the whole TSE > Unreal 3 thing yet, because I haven't seen any games come out of it, and I haven't talked to any fellow devs using it. Screenshots mean nothing. I want to see how it performs on a consumer system, how easy it is for developers to get what they want done in it, etc. Unreal 2 was horrible to work with in a production environment when you had to do things that were very different than what it came with, and anyone who used U2 will tell you that.
The other thing, though, is...you have listed ~8 people using U3. Do you have any idea how many hundreds of games used RenderWare? There are a lot of games that get pushed because they use the "big name(s)" in graphics engines, when in reality it's all just another stream in the buzz for the game. You will always hear a big deal about a game using Unreal, but you never hear a big deal about a game using GameBryo, when both engines are perfectly good engines. GTA used RenderWare, but for some reason there was no mass-movemnt of, "OMFG RenderWare = tehwin!1!!" yet there is about Unreal.
I personally think that BioWares decision to use Unreal is a poor one. Their engine, Aurora is tailored to their gameplay needs. The graphics on the games, I think, are pretty poor, but I can't tell what exactly the reason is. The water shader in Hoards of the Underdark sucked ass, if I remember right. The polycounts are low. However they have a very powerful framework for things they need to do to create RPGs, and I think that the effort that will go in to modifying Unreal to suit their needs will end up being more work than reworking their graphics. Graphics are, well, kind of easy actually. Unless you have a very, very poorly architected engine, graphics upgrades are very easy to do because it's all common knowledge. It's easy to figure out how to put a shader on something. It's easy to get a normalmapping shader in, once you have the shaders, and it just builds from there. The tough things in programming are things like, "How can I create a system that is easy for artists and level designers to use so they can create the environments they want." It looks like Unreal 3 could have some very sweet tools, though, and BioWare may have just decided that doing tech and games is a pain in the ass. So whatever.
