I wonder whether optical illusion plays a part. I mean, you're looking at thousands of dots, that's gotta do some funky stuff with your brains.
It's hard to compare brightness, unless you have a hardware monitor calibrator. It can measure the brightness/luminance.
I'm running at 100 cd/m2, 6500 Kelvin color temperature and 2,2 gamma. 100~120 cd/m2 is about the maximum a CRT monitor can come up with.
Most modern TFT monitors have a luminance of 250~500 cd/m2! I even had to reduce the brightness of my graphics card to achieve CRT standards.
Too bad the brightness is being used in marketing. Manufacturers know that people drool at high specs but in this case it's just plain silly.
Who wants to look at stadium lights?