General: Urgh.

I love having a fast computer because of the speed benefits, and if there's a choice between having awesome graphics or shit graphics for the same game I will choose the awesome ones (except for competitive play), but it doesn't make much difference to my level of immersion.

To be honest the opposite thing seems to happen for me in modern, good-looking games. It's not because they're good looking but it's because the game developers care about making them good looking instead of focusing on gameplay.
I used to get so immersed in those 8-bit games where you type in what to do. Like if there's a door on the screen you type "open the door" and the little crappy character does it, but the fact that you could choose to do that or a dozen other things made it immersive. In modern games it seems like the player is just guided through the game the way the developers wanted. And of course that will be the case because what game development team has the budget to create high-quality cutscenes for lots of different choices? Their financiers would kill them and it would add years onto the development cycle by which time the graphics engine would be outdated anyway.
When I start to follow those trains of thought I start to realise that the inverse correlation between great graphics and gameplay may actually be necessary rather than an arbitrary trend, which is a real shame and I can only hope that developers stop focusing so much on graphics so that the new generations can know the wonder we had with Sega Master System, Nintendo, DOS, etc. (I won't say Atari because that was basically sports games which were really fun but not too immersive in terms of storyline)

Edit: ^ That's what happens when I start typing straight after waking up lol

sonic on my sega game gear, i was the only kid i knew with one of these, and it was fucking leet