No, is the short answer.
I've worked in the games industry a long time, and I make games for a living. What I see are the following things happen over and over again:
1) Developers have to sell their game to a publisher. The vast majority of execs at publishers have never made a game before and therefore know nothing about the process. Typically, they will never even play the prototype in a pitch meeting - all they will do is watch someone else play it. Sadly, this means that if the graphics aren't close to , then the pitch is dismissed, regardless of how innovative the gameplay. That is the sad, frustrating truth of games publishers.
2) Writing snazzy shaders on modern hardware is pretty straightforward if you're half decent at math. It's not like the (good) old days, where we were optimizing assembly code to eek every last cycle out of a sprite print. The hardware does the heavy lifting, and the graphics engineer simlpy has to implement a variation of a Siggraph paper. In the grand scheme of things, this is not very difficult.
3) Writing good gameplay code (such as AI, controls, etc.) is not simple. It sounds like it is, but trust me - it isn't; it's very, very difficult to get a game 'feeling' right. It also isn't something that can be learnt - you either have 'it' or you don't.
4) I could throw a rock right now and hit five great graphics engineers. It would take me a long time to find a good gameplay engineer. Graphics guys are much easier to hire because there's so many of them, thanks in part to the multitude of University courses that teach them how to write shader code. Why do they want to write shader code? Because it's the 'cooler' side of programming. The guy that spends weeks tweaking some AI code to get the gameplay feeling just right will get no recognition; the guy that just wrote some whizzbang particle effect will. It's like a AAA physics engineer - absolutely invaluable on your team, but really really hard to find because there's no hero element to the work.
5) The 'our game is going to be cinematic' syndrome. The current blight of the games industry. A game 'looking cinematic' requires a higher number of graphics engineers than you'd usually need. Points #4 and #1 then come into play and increase that number still further.
6) Most game developers think that the public want 'cinematic looking' games. Do you? I'm not sure, but this is another reason why so much of the budget and focus is on graphics; the perception of what the mainstream gamer sees as most important. Personally, I see this a self-fulfilling prophecy within the industry at the moment, and I am sick to death of 'realistic' games where everything is brown.
So no; good graphics do not create bad gameplay, but most game teams these days have a higher quality of graphics engineer than they do gameplay engineer, and this is down (primarily) to the fact that the former is ten-a-penny, and the latter is like finding a needle in a haystack. Good graphics=easy, good gameplay=hard.