I felt its magnificence was its ability to evoke emotion. In the case of the supposed convolutions, it was the ability to evoke confusion. The confusion helped promote and maintain the tension, so that the catharsis was stronger, because the key fact in the whole thing is "Cobb is lost". I, for one, was crying by the end of the movie.

The masterpiece of The Dark Knight was the same thing, except that the emotion was horror: each of the Joker's little atrocities kept building up and building up until the last one was so large that he didn't even need to be on screen anymore.

That's Nolan's trade mark. He uses callbacks and repetition to mount emotion.