On paper, the XSX GPU looks comparable to an RTX 2080, which is anywhere from $950 to $1100 CAD.
The RTX 2080 is going to be more than two years old by the time these consoles come out, and there should be a new generation of graphics cards launching around that time, possibly offering significantly better value. We already have the 2070 SUPER, a card that typically performs within 5-10% of a 2080 for under $700 CAD, so the 2080 is a pretty poor value at this point (and arguably always has been compared to last-gen hardware). It's possible that there could be new cards offering a similar level of performance for around the price of an RTX 2060 or RX 5700 not too long after these consoles come out. Nvidia will be moving to a new process node, AMD will be moving to the same updated architecture as the consoles, and Intel should be joining the graphics card market as well, so I would expect a lot of competition in that space relatively soon.
I really wish they'd make this gen dual boot.
The entire point of a console is to lock people into a software ecosystem. The manufacturer isn't making any significant money on the base hardware, and is in many cases losing money on it. They make their money on game licensing and distribution, online services and proprietary hardware peripherals, so if people were using their consoles as Windows PCs and largely ignoring the console side of things, that would only be costing them money.
A lot of people are overlooking the fact the file IO takes MUCH longer the floating point ops.
It's yet to be seen how the new consoles might use the SSD for things like caching data, but in general, I doubt that would be much of a limitation. Today's open-world games manage to load data in the background relatively smoothly even on the ultra slow, 5400RPM laptop drives that the current consoles use. No doubt they need to optimize within the limitations of that hardware to make it work, but moving to an SSD will give them a massive amount of headroom to work with, no matter the exact amount of performance a drive manages to offer. And of course, both consoles have 8-core, 16-thread processors to work with, so they should be able to dedicate some threads to loading and processing this data in the background without substantially impacting a game's performance.
Anyway, as these hardware "face offs" usually go, this one is rather silly. Perhaps more so than usual, since we are comparing systems based on incomplete specifications, and they are still more than half a year away from launch. How much cache will each processor have? Will they offer significantly different levels of raytracing capability? What sort of flash memory will each SSD be using? Will one system be significantly more expensive than the other? At this point, it's anyone's guess, at least among those who are not actually working on them.