Having fired some of their weapons, I disagree that there is no difference between an AK-47 or AR-15 and a hunting rifle. Magazine size and ease of reloading make a difference. Semi-automatic weapons such as the AK-47, AR-15 or even SKS can still be manually fired at high rates, with easy reloading. They were designed for combat, not hunting, and even removing their fully-automatic capability, they're still quite effective.
Yes, this is sort of true, depending on the rifle. Some hunting rifles are as efficient as an AR-15, and some aren't.
The ease of reloading a hunting rifle depends on the type of magazine it takes. Internal box or rotary magazines will be slow to reload, since you've got to feed the bullets into the magazine. (Yeah, a stripper clip speeds this up, but only so much.) But there's plenty of hunting rifles with external box magazines, which can be reloaded as fast as any gun with detachable box magazines.
A semi-automatic's a semi-automatic. There's no real difference in rate of fire once the bullets are loaded. (I suppose a heavier trigger pull might slow you down a little.)
Aftermarket magazine capacity isn't that different if you're using a box magazine, but the bigger the magazine, the more likely it jams, making the big magazine sort of moot.
It's true that there aren't many (any? I've never seen one) high-capacity drum magazines for hunting rifles, but personally I'd rather leave those on the market as a honeypot for idiots. The damn things jam all the bloody time and clearing the jam takes at least as long as reloading a detachable box magazine (and possibly forever, if you're just some random sociopath with no firearms knowledge who just bought whatever looked scary).
