You're talking about story rather than technicality. Visually, the CG is better, in most cases (although it's still easier to make environments with miniatures).
And again with Terminator, I'm just comparing something like the CG Terminator Endoskeleton to the stop motion Endoskeleton. Of course T1 and T2 are better than T3, but that's due to the story rather than the FX quality.
Honestly, I see nothing stellar about the CG work in T3. It looked phony.
There are other movies where the CG work looks very realistic, but again, the illusion is oftentimes hampered by crappy "acting" of the CG character due to the animator being a crappy "actor" if you know what I mean. It's like they do the fake prolonged theater stage death with swirls and arm movements and hamming things up instead of just losing all sense of connection with any and all of your body parts and just collapse to the ground. Monsters have to stumble forward and swirl around (troll in Harry Potter 1, big snake in Harry Potter 2 and many other CG creatures). They can't just DIE...
The reason Davy Jones worked in Pirates and why Gullom worked in Lord of the Ring was due to ONE single fact - there was an actor dictating the movements and the character. Jar Jar also had an actor on set, but it is very unlikely much of his movements were used at all, when the digital creation was put in his place + the character sucked, because he never felt natural or plausible. I would take a puppet Yoda from the OT over digital Yoda from the prequels... also because the artists designing him in the prequels absolutely had no bleading concept about how Yoda actually looked and moved, but just made a crappy version copy - hell, they could have made a cast from the actual mold in the archives and scanned that and made him younger, but no... they had to have a digital sculptor do the work and he failed to capture the likeness... and because Frank Oz didn't control the movements... it just didn't feel as Yoda.
I'll take real people in armor over cgi troopers that walk in line formations into battle and every single trooper in every single line - front to back - is firing wildly at nothing - instead of taking cover and fighting like any normal person would when facing laser weapons - you don't just walk straight into the line of fire. That's just unbelievably retarded.
And no consequences befall a mass murdering Jedi, neither from the hands of the Jedi, any authority in the galaxy or Amidala... well... what kind of a signal is that to send to anyone. Hey... it doesn't matter if you kill men, women and children if you get pissed off... it's all cool. WOW.
They took so many wrong turns with the PT... and Lucas with his unwavering need to make the OT more like the PT... that I don't care for the movies anymore. Every other director and studio gives us the theatrical versions and the special editions and the director's cuts, cleaned up, restored and made pretty for DVD and Blu-Ray: Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, James Cameron... but not Lucas.