I'm not so sure about that. He works with actors already known for their performances so I question how much of that is down to him. When we look at his work with unknowns (for example the ferry sequence in The Dark Knight) the acting is pretty bad, which suggests to me that he's relying on the warhorses to deliver on their own accord.
He's also got a nose for plot but seems uncomfortable with basic human emotion. Most of the human touches in his film are sold by the actors rather than the writing or direction. I think Nolan does a great line in "portentous" and that plays well for a certain crowd. But he's barely capable of delivering the action in his action movies and his dramatic chops fall short of spectacular. Does anyone care about Bruce Wayne in the Batman movies? Does anyone care about anything other than the mystery in Memento? He never got the Rachel Dawes character to work.
He knows how to make a frame look good and how to deliver "cool" set pieces. But so does Michael Bay, who is probably technically a better director yet who hasn't managed to create a zombie army of geeks who confuse Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight. But I'm still waiting for that innovative shot; that subverted technique; anything at all that would hint at moving from "adequate" to "inspired" or even "the best."
That's just my opinion, and I could be wrong. But then again so much of the Nolan love seems to be coming from the same place, and it's a crowd that lacks grounding in cinema and which over and over again proves incapable of mounting an argument that Nolan is a great director that doesn't ultimately boil down to "the Joker was badass."
Ummm...yeah...he of the frantic, moving camera at all times. Michael Bay never met a sweeping, circular shot he didn't like. Seriously, he even parodies himself in his commercial.
Such statements make me a 
