@Purkake: For me, the leveling and the loot have always been the reward, just as much as the story is. I grew up on my brother's Final Fantasy and DnD, so yeah, I love me some leveling. Therefore, since two out of my top three criteria for RPG-dom are missing, I really can't classify ME2 as a pure RPG.
I don't think Bio, or rather, EA, ever meant it to be an "RPG" in the vein of Kotor or the other Bio games. They wanted to bring in the shooter audience; as a business decision it makes sense, and certainly they made no secret about it. But to appease the trigger-happy CoD fanboys, they needed to remove some of the RPG elements, and that's exactly what they did.