I was reading this earlier actually, it's a great breakdown of a classic pipeline (A great comparison for people looking to learn would be to study the Doom3/Quake4 rendering pipeline and compare it to this so you can get a feel for the evolution of graphics - what's old, what's hot etc)

Of course with the rise of computing on the GPU, many cutting edge pipelines/graphics algorithms are starting to leverage the power of DX11 Compute / OpenCL for certain rendering techniques. This means that pretty soon, shader tricks will be a thing of the past (I'm amazed that a DX11 title fully supporting tesselation would employ such crude SSAO + Shadow algorithms!)

Give it a few more years still and we'll see Engines + GPU's make the move to true real-time ray-tracing making all of our complicated raster 'short-cuts' and approximations a thing of the past. This is likely to be developed in tandem with voxel based static scenery at first (enabling the same LOD calculations to work on both 'meshes' and 'textures' and lending very well to the ray-tracing process) with the later developments of fully deformable/skinnable dynamic voxel objects.

As animating detailed voxel models (with multiple blend weights + animation path smoothing) is currently the primary bottleneck, expect to see a native voxel representation in hardware + APIs with the ability to apply weighted transformations on large groups of voxels.

Combine this with the very different approach of ray-tracing and GPU's of the near future will be very different beasts to what we see today, even to the point that I expect the current raster approach to real-time 3D graphics will simply be 'emulated' on these new cores via complex GPU bound code. There will no doubt be a point during the transition where dedicated raster cards beat ray-tracing cards at the raster game and for a short time the ability of a newer card to perform well with old raster style rendering will be a big factor.

It's a very, very exciting time to be in game development!