The lack of physical challenge in adventure games (or "action") has never been the main problem. The real hurdle on the road to mainstream success is playability, accessibility, readability -- whatever you want to call it.
Games like LA Noire, Professor Layton and Heavy Rain (though technically not an adventure game) remove the convolution that plagues traditional point & click adventure games. Puzzles are still there to be solved -- sometimes very difficult ones -- but the difference is the rules and objectives are clear. There is no rubbing inventory items on random hot-spot because the game hasn't explained itself properly, or has misguided expectations of the player.
Adventure games that achieve mainstream success are doing it by embracing a new way of doing things, whether it's altering progression and structure, using new technology or simplifying things.
A game like Gray Matter is not going to be more successful in the future because LA Noire and Heavy Rain opened people's minds to "story games", not if it still has all the problems the genre has been struggling with since its conception.
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