I feel like elder scrolls managed to achieve the right sort of balance with that sort of thing. I find that the discovery of landmarks you can fast travel to any time you like is a pretty satisfying exploration loop. It's even better when you install a mod that lets you immediately jump out of a dungeon instead of being forced to trawl through an area you've already explored just to get to the exit. A lot of games developers are very guilty of doing this and it seems to be just a general oversight in level design. Depends on what sort of game you're going for though, I do agree that when it comes to movement it's a bit silly to have them running for miles and miles when even pretty fit people would never be able to do that.

Also I see a lot of people going on about vehicles, but what about jetpacks and flying monsters? :D