Not everything has to be about
SEO. The two articles pointing to sites are more about inspirational designs. Naturally the sites will be more well known since the author of the post had to find the examples. I think the idea with the images is that images will help sell your products.
Some of the sites in the 20 inspirational designs are also Flash based sites and I wouldn't recommend that unless you're confident you can get traffic to the site and have a brand, but not all of them are. For example I clicked through the Victoria's Secret site (nope, it was just the first big name site I clicked that was html) and while the home is all images as you dig down to the product pages there is text on them. In fact those pages looked like your typical product page.
On the home page you and I would go with more text, but we could still use plenty of images on the home page and category pages. It's the product pages that are going to benefit the most by having text on them when it comes to
seo. The home page and category pages are going to need links to rank.
Still even if your pages rank well and pull traffic, what's the point if the site can't convert visitor to buyer.