I've recently bought a 4.5 inch reflector telescope, so far, by looking at the eyepiece I didn't see anything special.
The sun and the moon have detail (not a surprise since the first is gigantic and the second is so close), but for everything else, I didn't see anything special. Jupiter was a fuzzy ball, no detail at all. Saturn was even more fuzzy, Andromeda was a small smudge smaller than the moon, and the Pleiades were brighter than the other dots, but they were still nothing but regular dots, same as all the others.
I have a simple question, on those internet topics that show what you can see with a small telescope, they're referring to the long exposure image you can get from a camera, not really what you can see directly on the eyepiece, right?