Anyone who plays AAA games knows the currently state of the art and technical limitations. Sure it's not everyone, but a large enough non-technical portion of the population will be able to appreciate it, to some degree.
This is assuming that they'll look at a non-interactive demo and get why someone would insist on not pre-rendering everything in the first place instead of comparing it against pre-generated video. That was becoming a problem already 20+ years ago in explaining to people what made a given demo impressive, because most people aren't interested in the technical limitations.
