Unique is overrated

Inside the games industry I feel there is far too much focus on Unique Selling Points (USP). So much so that a lot of larger developers and publishers require a game design to have at least one USP before they will consider signing-off the money.
The fact that there are very few truly unique ideas left immediately causes problems if you as a designer are made to go down this route. Also, is an idea still unique if it's been used in a different genre already? Is it not actually unique at all, but a combination of other ideas from similar games or an extension of an existing one? Depends what your managers/the board consider “unique”, which varies.
How many games have had a USP crowbarred in just to satisfy the requirements of another department? Has this helped the sales of the game? Has it made the game better or worse for it's inclusion? Or has it had no appreciable effect? In the end was the programmer/artist/designer time worth the money invested in it, just to get an extra bullet point on the press release?
The only thing that this benefits 100% is the marketing department. It is their “hook” on which to hang the advertising of the game and nothing more. Yes, it's different if a designer comes up with a game idea that includes something unique purely through the design or even the game itself is based around a unique concept. It's when games are forced to have a USP seemingly just to have one that bothers me. Here's a test try thinking of one moment in all the videogames you've played when you've thought “I've never seen that feature in a game before and the game is all the better for it!” I doubt you'll get into double-figures, and how many hundred games are released every year? Do we, as the buying public, really care about USPs? Would you deliberately NOT buy a game if it didn't have any USPs?
Personally I would happily play videogames for the rest of my life that had absolutely no unique features in them at all. It's not something I care about when looking to buy a game, I'm more interested in the actual gameplay and/or story. For example if every Zelda game released from today had the same control method, combat method, inventory design but all with a different story, new characters and events I would die a happy man.
Surely we are now beyond the early days of cinema, where each new film was sold on the new “thing” that the film-makers had included – “In this one, two cars come towards the camera at the same time, while the camera MOVES!”. We should start stretching ourselves not technically but artistically. We have the ability to do this now and I'd much rather see money go towards a decent scriptwriter and concept art to create a visually rich story than assigned to a programmer and artist to make sure that the contractually required USP goes in to make someone else's life easier.