If you look closely, you'll see that there is quite a bit of recoil, it's just 3D recoil and not pure player-fought recoil. (Both are good and realistic systems, though I'm a bit more fond of he pure, except that there are no games do that that I can think of, except maybe PR.
It could be possible that it's just a 3D animation tied to a cone of fire but I don't think so... that would be a major cop-out (is that an offensive term to cops? Or does i actually have nothing to do with police officers?). As for the CORE of the FPS like you are saying 44, I see HUGE differences between the games you are talking about. Just not huge differences in gameplay, but that's likely just because all the GAMERS are stuck in the run and gun paradigm, and the maps and attention (powerups, perks, etc) are all supportive of a chaotic, frenetic environment with little real cooperation. That's one of the things I like about CS, with only one life, you have to be more careful, and you see a lo of people "naturally" moving together tactically.
Personally, I see a MASSIVE difference between BC2 normal and hardcore modes. But I do hope that BF3 will have an even greater divergence.
(For the un-initiated: Cone of fire, is when the bullets are distributed randomly inside a "cone" of accuracy not necessarily tied to the weapon orientation. For an example, especially evident in BF2 weapon mechanics are large cones of fire, you can see this as well in CS:S, whereas Insurgency has almost NO cone of fire. Ideally, in games [for best realism], the weapons would have a tiny cone of fire [like Insurgency] just to allow for the actual natural inaccuracy of the weapon, then all realized inaccuracy and bullet vectors would be determined mostly by weapon sway, actual simulated recoil, and where the weapon model is actually pointed at the time the bullet breaches the barrel.)
