Due to reasons out of Bethesda's control I had to start from scratch. Initially, I noticed long pauses between lines during the Ralof and Lokir dialog exchange, sometimes they will stop talking at arbitrary lines and just stare at eachother. Either way they never get to the line where General Tullius is described talking to the Aldmeri. I've done multiple playthroughs of the intro scene and the only consistent part of this issue is when the carts reach their end point in Helgen the wheels continue moving (on the other cart, albiet erratically) the "hoof & wheel" audio continues playing and the camera bob persists. Basically, I'm stuck in the back of the cart. I have dumped my cache, clean restarted and even let the scene play out for 10 minutes+ with no avail. Obviously this isn't an issue for long-time players, especially if they were smart and kept the first auto-save just before character selection, but unless I'm the only one this may affect new players who came in post 1.6.

I'm not sure if this affects the PC version and I'm too scurred to try.

I should've known better before running to the forums right away. Just as I was about to threaten Bethesda with a class action lawsuit I remembered I had a similar problem with another game and the remedy was to clean (or replace) the disk. So anyone with any kind of issue during scripted instances of Skyrim keep that in mind. Issue resolved, lock/ban/delete I guess.