Tom,
In line with the contrarian motif of this thread, lets add another dimension.
Name some courses with markedly severe green surfaces and green complexes that aren't considered great greens.
Ben:
I've seen many severe greens that were not, in my view, great greens. However, this is a difficult assessment to make because it's a sliding scale ... every person has a different point at which they think contour goes from being cool to being "over the edge". [And, for some people, it's clear that some do not countenance the greens at Crystal Downs or Augusta National, even though they are consistently named among the BEST COURSES IN THE WORLD.]
For my tastes, greens get too severe when you get to the point of six-foot tiers. Some guys here love Mike Strantz's greens, but I'm not a fan because of the huge tiers in some of them ... I think they are out of scale with the normal putting and chipping strokes.
At the same time, I think you can also have greens with too many little movements, though it would take some careful analysis to determine why I think Walter Travis' greens are almost always terrific, and Jack Nicklaus' new internal contours generally seem over the line. I think a lot of it goes back to context, though. Travis' greens are coming at the end of parkland holes on a 6,400 yard course; Jack's are coming at the end of holes with severe hazards on a course that totals 7,500 yards.
P.S. to Anthony: You are dead right with the first paragraph in your post. I spend the majority of my time on site looking at all the potential recovery shots around all of the greens, and looking at the most severe putts on each green, trying to ensure that they are all okay given the nature of the hole in question. My standard for what's acceptable is somewhat different than that of others, but it is rigorously applied. That's why I think other architects generally fail when they try to build a hole (or a course) with more severe greens ... because once they cross the line of their own internal standard, they don't have any means of judging whether the green is good or not. [It's either that, or they just don't really see enough of the greens before there is grass on them and they realize a large percentage of them need to be rebuilt.]