Rob, It'd probably be a pretty good place to hide out after the high altitude emp burst takes out all our communications and returns the world to the early 19th century. Actually, it's a root cellar at a ranch that was homesteaded in the 19th century.
But with regard to landscape, if anybody wants to see why there's no way photography can compete with painting when it comes to landscape, they need to look up Albert Bierstadt's painting:
Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California. The image kept jumping into my mind as I read the comments on this thread, but I couldn't remember the name of the painting or the name of the artist. Finally, after a bit of a search, I found it. You can get a rough idea of what's involved at
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/bierstadt/bierstadt_among.jpg.html. You can get a larger view of the painting by clicking on the "Image Viewer" hyperlink on that page, but to see the real article you need to go to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC.
You could spend the rest of your life sitting with your camera waiting, like Ansel Adams, for this kind of scene to appear, but you'd die unsatisfied. Yes, the painting's exaggerated, the mountains in the background are stretched, and the lighting's physically impossible, but so what?!! The first view of this painting is almost enough to knock you down. I've never seen a photographic landscape that can produce anywhere near the emotional impact of this painting, and there are plenty of other paintings with the same kind of impact.