I finally realized why people young and old alike are captivated by the Transformers toy and media franchise.  For a while it escaped me but now that I think about it the concept is quite simple.  The attraction is due to the idea that gets distilled into the mind through beholding the marvelous transformation actions and abilities of the Transformers robots within the frame of a story.  That through the force of will the manifestation of a being can be shifted into something else and idealistically that would equate to becoming of use in the world for it to ultimately become better.  To reiterate, while the visual change depicted in the morphing actions of Optimus Prime for example, into an 18 wheeler, is a superficial one the importance of the change is rather focused towards when and why the character chooses to change in the first place.  This is what creates the real meat of the message of Transformers.  In immediate answer to the change one can see that Optimus Prime transforms into an 18 wheeler due to his sheer size compared to the other robots like Bumblebee (whose transformation is a sports car) but this means so much less than when we see that he has to change in order to bring about an action that he couldn't have imparted had he remained in his regular humanoid form.

Chinese have also been captivated by the idea of change hundreds of years before the Transformers concept.  For example in the story Journey to the West the Taoist sage teaches Wukong, the monkey, how to transform into 72 manifestations so that he might become enlightened.  Unfortunately the motivations for change were not mastered by Wukong and he uses his abilities for egotistical concerns.  It isn't until later on in the story that we begin to see a different Wukong whom has a responsibility to the monk Xuanzhang that we realize his redemption lies in his righteous usage of his transformation abilities for the protection of his physically weak master.