Call of Duty is short, multiplayer-focused, and compares horribly (at least in the eyes of us PC gamers) to more modern designs like STALKER and Crysis. Yes, both Half-Life 2 and CoD are linear, but there's a world of difference between the two in every other area...
When Half-Life 2 came out, immersion was something new, and Half-Life managed it beautifully, marrying old designs (corridor-bubble, as I'd call it, with small, yet open areas of exploration and combat married to more linear corridor segments) and new ideas (no cutscenes, player agency all the way through) over a 14-odd hour singleplayer experience.
In contrast, CoD is a straight corridor. The only "open" areas are basically shooting galleries, each with exactly one entrance and one exit, the latter of which will probably be held open for you... heck, it's even divided up into missions with debriefings and loading screens in between. it successfully brought the hollywood blockbuster to videogames, capturing both the good and the bad of big-budget films. But that style of games has reached the limit of its appeal.
STALKER, Crysis, and a few other games have created what I would call the "bubble" FPS genre. No (or few) corridors, no fellow soldiers opening doors for you... you enter a map, and you can go anywhere in that map you darn well please. It's a revelatory experience, akin to the difference between playing (say) Dragon Age 2 and Skyrim. It represents a promising potential future for a once-again-stagnant genre, which is currently chasing its own tail around that same, tired corridor model of gaming.
So what am I saying? There should be room for all three brands - immersive, passively-guided experiences; movie-style, actively guided shooting galleries; and huge open-world playgrounds. But right now, only one is being made in any significant quantities - and that is causing a great deal of resentment.
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It seems to me that the real value of the game is the huge install base and the related thickness of multiplayer game opportunity that install base allows for. It makes for competitive opportunity, which I think weighs much more heavily in the minds of the players of the game than the effectiveness of the storytelling and gameplay mechanics of s single player campaign that often goes unplayed.
What was Portal sold for? $20.
Put another way, Half-Life 2 was twice to thrice the length, at least 1.5x the quality-per-second of gameplay, immersion, and fun (although your mileage may vary), and 0.8x the cost of Black Ops. As a singleplayer game, therefore, it is about 5x as good (straight multipliers) as Black Ops. And people wonder why it is regarded as superior...?
No less, you're preaching to the choir here. I don't want to speak for everyone here, but I can't really think of many people with huge hard-ons for MW. Most of what I hear is criticism, maybe the MW fans are silent largely, but that's not the impression I get.
Which Portal are you talking about? The first one, which sold at about that price was like a one-hour game. The second one was about six, but it was $50 when it released.
I too tended to buy the Modern Warfare games for the single player experience but generally just wait until they go down in price. Compared to games like Heavenly Sword or Portal - the length of the game is just fine.
The meat of the COD games is in fact the multiplayer which offers hundreds of hours of online play. Games like Crysis or Stalker may be prettier and may have a more open concept for the single player, but in large part this is because the multiplayer portion of those games is secondary. With the Call of Duty series, the single player portion is secondary. Call of Duty sells well because it's a solid multiplayer game. Everything works. Unlike BF3, Homefront, MAG or any multitude of games that have released in a broken state needing fixing (which sometimes never happens) - Call of Duty is simply jump in and play online. There are tons of different modes and the rank/unlock system has a lot of depth to proved hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay.
If your preference is for single player shooter games, then wait until a COD game drops to the $20 or $30 price point and buy it then. Problem solved.
To be honest, most people will buy a game like COD on release and play the online first... then go back and maybe do the campaign later. They'll wait and buy a game like Crysis when it goes on sale a year after release, because they're buying it for the single player game, and the online multiplayer population doesn't even have to exist to still enjoy the game.
There is room for a lot of variety in the FPS genre, but the reality is that people will buy a multiplayer game new because they want to rank up quickly and immediately get into the online play. More open FPS games like Borderlands or Far Cry 2 people can wait for a price drop because online rank is as important. If you're seeing a push toward corridor shooters that are short in length - it's likely because developers are hoping people are buying the game for the multiplayer so that they can enjoy the pre-order and release day sales that games like COD have... rather than lose out to used game sales.