I always took Ross' sig to only be a reference to things that are not going to be in Ashes Cricket 2013 - a reasons to buy their game and not the other one (in case you could read both forum sections and be in doubt)
Of what's there right now, nets have appeared in the majority of recent cricket games, the EA games have more recently had some degree of manual fielding (as opposed to just manual catching and end selection in the recent Codemasters ones) and they've all recently had multiple camera angles (IC2010 pushed that pretty hard).
I would suggest for some of those it's easy to make the case that they've done either a better job, if they are really proud of the work they've put in to features that might have technically been in other games before, I don't blame them for wanting to show them off.
The review system and career mode are obvious total firsts, and you'd probably have to look to the management games to find similarly detailed tour/competition editors. The Cricket Academy is mostly unique, of course other games have included things named 'player editors' - it's a point where Big Ant can certainly claim a lot of new components for a cricket title - though they are obviously the first game with a 'Cricket Academy'.
