I'm not sure I would agree with this. I was a postdoc @ Harvard Med, so I knew a fair number of med students there as well as grad students. I don't want to dismiss your assertion out of hand, but I think the truth is a little murky here.
> Do you think that the students from your undergrad could do this?
In short: yes.
> Do you think that they aim to?
This is a key question and here the answer would often be "no." One key differentiator that I saw between HYPS and my state school is that EVERYONE at the HYPS places was _driven_. They were not looking for occupations where they would 'take orders.' In contrast, many (not all!) of my friends at the state school were roughly as smart as the people I met at the Ivies, but they were not necessarily _driven_. For example, I knew plenty of remarkably intelligent nursing majors at my state school. No one I met at the Ivies would ever consider being a nurse. That being said, I knew several people at my state school who were quite talented and driven pre-meds and the elite schools barely sniffed at them.
Obviously, I didn't know everything about the Ivy undergrads that I taught, but I knew enough of them well enough to have a sense of how talented they were with respect to research (my classmates and I supervised many undergrads doing research).
There is an inherent difficulty in these types of discussions: we are both basing our opinions on small amounts of subjective data.
