Gawd... what a sad & crazy statement to make... 
How on earth could you class someone as an Artist if all they did "was press a button"...
The point I was making is that what I care about it the product, it doesn't matter much to me how they get to that product. Obviously, if all they needed to do was pressing a button, the real artist would be whomever developed the system actually producing the music.
Without going into my likes & dislikes of what I call music and artists, a simple fact remains if an Artist or Band cant play well live then they are indeed talentless... 
I disagree. Playing live vs. composing music vs. putting on a good stage show are three different, orthogonal skills, and few artists have all three.
For something that exemplifies this well, look at electronic music pioneers like Jarre and Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk aren't even on stage during the performance of some of their work, and most of the members are for larger parts of the shows pretty much just performing stage shows rather than playing music (one of them triggers a speech synthesizer instead of singing himself, for example), though they *can* play too.
Jarre does tend to play and have band members play, but it's largely theatrics as most of his pieces could easily enough just be pre-programmed into his synths.
In both cases their main talent is composing and the stage shows, and actually playing the music live is an optional element.
On the other hand, most pop artists these days don't compose their own material - their talent is performing, not composing or writing lyrics.
Which ones are the true "artists"? It depends entirely on what aspect you find most interesting. I care about the music, not the performance beyond what is needed to make it sound good.
If their performance can be assisted by tools, I really don't care, as long as the end result is good. If the tools become the majority of their performance, all that changes is that their talents are in how they use the tools rather than in singing or playing an instrument - they still need to find a way to make their performance stand out.
