Better production values can make for a pleasanter experience, but I also feel that it doesn't necessarily intrinsically make a better game. On the other hand, a game with a boring generic story, and/or shallow, unchallenging and/or uninteresting gameplay, might appear to be a better game than a really original, rich and challenging game, because it appears more polished, but one has to then qualify which aspects of it would make it better than the other game.
A game can have a good story and gameplay system, and setting, etc, but still be shoddily produced. That is to say, if a game with low production values had been produced by another dev or if the same dev had been been forced by a different publisher to meet higher standards, that game would still have been intrinsically the same game, but would appear a lot more polished and technically better taken care of and/or result in better gameplay, because of the higher production values, and just for that reason it will obviously give a better impression at first glance.
From there, it will depend on how important each aspect of a game is to the particular gamer, in how forgiving he will be towards poorer production values.