Simple fact is every platform has their own take on technology, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and it has been going on for a while. One thing I know for sure is if you are in the lead you should push your advantage to the limit and not assume you can stay number one on name value only. Nintendo did that with the Wii, the controller was something totally left-field out of the R&D labs. Very soon afterwards both MS and Sony had their own motion controller. Sony's was a compete hash, a desperate copy and ultimately obvious. Kinect was a direct response but more like a retaliatory strike from a cruise missile. It may not be everyone's cup of tea but the technology behind it is like trumping a Horseless carriage with a Space Shuttle.
I get that all these companies probably have moles and corporate espionage going on so either Microsoft has really strong secrecy and trusted engineers, or Sony deliberately chose not to match some of the features. Performance is not as far apart as the obvious fanbois would make out, to the naked eye the difference is almost imperceptible and you have to rely on professional benchmarking software to see any improvement. Simply put, backwards compatibility is something that PC gamers have taken for granted forever, I have DOS games that I can still play on Windows 8.1 and have reason to believe will not continue with Windows 10.
So Sony followed a pre-programmed script, as they always do, announce a shit ton a games. Well done, I expect games to be released, all the time. As a games console that is the absolute minimum I expect. Todays gamer is more demanding though, gone are the days of casual Mario Kart with a buddy in the living room, we demand more and we will buy from the company that gives us what we want. Some people may decry the backwards compatibility issue, but if you spent hundreds buying Xbox 360 games and wanted to upgrade to a next-gen console, do you go PS4 and definitely not ever play them again, or go Xbox One and keep playing. It also sets a precedent that any successor to the Xbox One should retain the same feature and be backwards compatible again, just like PC gaming. As a long term strategy, it makes a lot more sense as that ties gamers to your product between generations. Sony will either not copy this feature, just to make a point, or it will copy it but as it did it well after Xbox it will be an embarrassing admission that it only did so because it was forced.
This is not what a single gamer thinks, no matter how vocal they state "this is my opinion", this is the strategy of marketing to masses and locking in customer loyalty. Microsoft has the money to push this much harder than Sony and all it would take for E3 2016 would be a CPU refresh, similar to the Jasper on Xbox 360, RAM and perhaps even slimlining the case. Make sure that if Sony do the same you trump them by having your own moles feed you their plans, and Sony would lose the hairline performance edge too.
Sega went the way of the Dodo, to give rise to Nintendo, then Sony joined in and Nintendo dropped back, then Microsoft joined in. History has a funny way of repeating itself and unless Sony starts to really invest heavily in R&D and something other than just "more games" then PlayStation could become a fanboi exclusive, with the mass market going where it gets the most features. Watch this space.