Well, for mine, I don't think it was "obvious" in the sense of how you wrote your impression, but "obvious" in the sense of the impression itself. There's a reason that Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, among others, have cited him as a defining aspect of their maturity as an artist.
He turned into a joke at the end, because of his persona and his manner of death, but the degree of his celebrity and accomplishment shouldn't be understated. He's one of those singular figures that, regardless of whether you like his music or not, it's hard to deny that the landscape of modern music would look very different if he had never walked into Sun Studios back in '53.