Indeed, everything you say there is true in its own way.
To Be honest, You can P.l.a.y Vice city on almost any system, although some you wouldnt want. I Run it With the following specs:
6.4ghzCpu
2Gb Ram
8800GTS 1Gb GFX card.
So its pretty good, by no means is that a brilliant pc, was about a year ago but they just keep getting better, But more to the point, as a test we had an old pc downstairs, it was somthing like 833cpu, 312mb ram and about 4mb of onboard GFX, it run, it was playable, I quite enjoyed it, then i thought, for a laugh why not upgrade the system a little with a 32mb gfx card i had lying around. I Put it in and ended up playing Gta story mode for hours, it was playable, a good steady frame rate and the gfx were about ps2 standards, so nothing to be ashamed of.
Gta 3 was really good, Vice city, was proberly the best for me, i dont know why, its the one game i will look back on when im older and think "yeah i remember playing that when i was 12, Good Days

", and san andreas was fun but will proberly be a game to forget because pretty much everything had been covered in the previous 3d GTA Games. Then in my opinion gta 5 ir whatever the new one is ruined it, Way too "realistic" and the fact that sooo much people play it, so at school/college or whereever its the one game everone goes on about, so in my opinion that ruins it alone lol.