Except that you can give them the names you want. I admit, that is not much, but it's definitely a character customization aspect, even if it's very very little compared to some other RPGs. Square surely though that it was the minimum they could put in a RPG with pre-defined characters.

In an RPG the player takes on a role and 'plays' with character developpment.
The same in-game situation can be either a cake walk or a pain in the ass depending on advancement choices. Same situation, different challenge for different characters. To overcome most situations both the player and character skills come into play. That's Role Playing.
In an Adventure the player takes on a role, period.
Overcoming any given situation always presents the same challenge since it depends solely on player skills and not on character skills.
MI's are GOOD OLD adventure GAMES.

This is true, it did not really happen until Ultima IV, but JRPG's unfortunately never followed that trend. They kinda stopped evolving immediately after digesting the old-school Wizardry dungeon-crawler lots-of-random-encounters mechanic. They stopped developing, essentially, and it shows. Unfortunately, it seems RPG's died of old age :P

On topic: Graphical/Point-n-Click Adventure Games. Also, damn good ones! (escape doesn't exist!)
Off topic: Given the success of AD&D based cRPGs, I'd like to see that model used more widely with other PnP sources (after all, Fallout was going to be based on GURPS wasn't it?).
Also, as much as I like Forgotten Realms, AD&D covers much more ground, and who is sitting on all those IPs? Or do publishers really hate RPGs and wont green-light anything that isn't already based on a popular series?

Atari has all the publishing rights for D&D AFAIK, which might be a problem... And now that they're on an immense DRM spree of epic proportions (seriously, check out Dark Athena's DRM crap), while the apocalyptic necrowizards of EA seems to actually be toning down their's, I don't really know if I would want one from them. But seeing another Planescape game (While torment's writing is unparalleled, its whole gameplay aspect is almost non-existent) or Greyhawk game (practically the polar opposite of PS:T; extreme combat, okayish story), or a game from another campaign I'm unfamiliar with, would be awesome.

This one probably isn't much known outside Sweden (since the rule books exist in Swedish only), but I'm quite sad that the computer game (in English, as evident from the YouTube video in the first link) wasn't released.

Drakensang, its upcoming prequel, and Demonicon are all based on the DSA system.
The Vampire games were based off of P&P also (White Wolf's World of Darkness). I hope we see more games in that world sometime.
So I think it actually happens pretty regularly that a game is released with another IP than D&D.