I just watched "The Making of Oblivion" - Youtube and the npcs were more attractive and 'alive' in the video than the game. It looks like the was stripped of things that would made it far greater than it is. Even on a 2014, Lenovo Y70, 64bit laptop there's no change or do I still need a supercomputer to see all that is seen in the video?

All developers scrap ideas from all video games before release. Time constraints, budget constraints, changes in creative direction...there can be any number of reasons why a feature might be cut from a finished product.

This is true of other media too. Filmmakers film scenes that are not used in the finished film, novelists write scenes, characters, plot lines that do not appear in the published work. This is liable to happen anytime a human being creates an object of any kind.

Agreed but unfortunately Bethesda committed the sin of overpromising and underdelivering so the 'stripping' was rather hard to accept...

Not as much as Skyrim. In Oblivion, character creation involves so many more choices. In Skyrim, basically every character starts out the same, except for racial traits.

I don't think this is that kind of thread. I think the OP is asking "did we get the game that was advertised in the preview video's?"