Please! It only appears to be "smooth" because there is motion blur in those films and shows you've seen. Graphics on computers are NOT rendered with blur. Each frame is a perfect frame and thus the eye and brain are not tricked into feeling this "smoothness". Seriously, try setting a maximum framerate of 24 in a game and try panning the camera around and walking in the world. You will feel extremely uncomfortable and some people will even feel eye strain. How do movies get away with 24 FPS? That motion blur.
Motion blur in games only masks poor performance. We are living the experience through a window. Blurring that experience is ludicrous in most situations, which is why a lot of people hate motion blur and depth of field blur. Additionally, motion blur reduces your performance in games because it is a taxing effect to render.
All your other points are clear and speak truth. You really know what you are talking about but had a little trouble with this one part of your post. I hope I was of help to you.
There's no trouble with the post, and you've correctly identified why older
games seem so very smooth: blur. This is why console games began purposefully adding rendering effects like "motion blur" or "ghosting" all the way back in the N64 days. Especially on a CRT monitor or vacuum tube TV, it looks great.
Blur on film, however is a double-edged sword. It does mask the "stutter" with sharp camera movements, but it also limits how quickly you can move the camera while still capturing a clear image. In truth, camera operators go to great lengths to ensure that there is no blur in their moving shots. You're watching a steady 24-28 fps. Whenever a shot is needed requiring a lot of motion, like for action shots, camera operators often up their speed to 32 fps (which also mucks with your colors and requires an annoying post process, but I digress). It's the lack of "hard edges" and the natural DoF on film that allow the eye to view playback as perfectly smooth.
24 fps on a monitor, using frame-by-frame rendering, would look choppy, but 30 is quite nice. Add a bit of blur, and it's really quite smooth. Even 24 fps is not fatiguing on the eyes as long as the blur is high enough. Again, you have to let the eye adjust. Our brain has this funny little thing it does concerning any visual input it receives -- it adapts. It's only when things drop below 20 fps that the eye can clearly pick up on each frame in turn, and the motion seems interrupted.
Modern audiences struggle a bit because their eyes have become accustomed to 60 fps +. It will take about 10 minutes for the eye to view 30 fps as smooth (even without motion blur); it will take about an hour for the brain to forget what 60 fps was like. 30 will never look as smooth as 60, but it will no longer seem choppy.
Actually, if you play at 30 fps for long, looking at 60 fps again will be what seems unnatural: as if the images are "sliding around on the screen" instead of moving naturally.