First off let me say I love your site and your various technically oriented articles. As someone that always does extensive research before making any sort of PC related purchase, your reviews and editorials are always the first I check out. I value your opinion so much in fact that Tom’s Hardware is always my first recommendation to any of my friends that are building PCs for the fir time.
Now with all of that out of the way, as I am sure you can guess, this is where I disagree with one of your points in this article. More specifically the line where you state, “But gaming consoles do not mirror the PC graphics card market. The fastest console doesn't always win, as Sega can attest to.”
While I understand your point, and in general agree with your assertion that the hardware itself is less important than the software that runs on it: I feel this statement is trying too hard to draw parallels between past gaming history, and in general is ignoring the facts and is over generalized.
For starters, the Genesis and Jaguar (which I assume are the systems to which you are referring) both used hardware built around completely different types of chips than their competition. This of course made porting games from one system to another much more difficult to do (this was especially the case with the Jaguar which utilized two separate processors), and comparing hardware specs between systems was like comparing apples to oranges due to the inherent differences in architecture.
Obviously this is not the situation with the new generation of consoles; as they are essentially based on the same core with minor differences in terms of the die size and GPU. So that being the case, comparing system specs becomes more relevant; as these pieces of hardware will have to provide gamers with viable systems for years to come. The fact that the Xbox One already seems limited in what it can do does kind of make you question how it will fare long term in comparison to its Sony Rival.
Also I think it is worth mentioning that the Xbox One when back to a 32 bit based operating system, whereas more than likely the PS4 (which runs some sort of combination of Android and FreeBSD 9.x derivatives) is more than likely to some extent 64 bit. (I should make it clear that I have not read anything that confirms this, and that this is based purely on assumption on my part.) Given that the Jaguar is natively a 64 bit chip, this could also account for some of the performance discrepancies we are seeing between the two systems.
Finally, I also find it curious that Microsoft has the higher priced system that is supposed to offset its cost by offering owners with more entertainment oriented utility, but despite this fact they elected to go with what most seem to consider lower end hardware. Given the amount of multitasking that the Xbox developers intended for users to do with their system, this seems like an odd choice to me; as I would think a higher end graphics card might have an easier time handling the workload derived from all the extra multimedia functionality that is included in the Xbox one.
The fact that Sony has opted to offer better hardware at a lower price point that is more purely focused on gaming seems to me to be a huge advantage going forward. Again, while I do agree with you in terms of software being the biggest factor, and I found your review of the Xbox One overall very well done…. I think that if you are looking at this generation of consoles purely from the view of what type of long term gaming experience will they offer you in return for your investment: you have to consider and compare what type of hardware you are getting as part of that investment.
(And for the record, before I get flamed for being a PS4 Fanboy: the last console I owned was a Dreamcast, and the PC is my platform of choice for gaming. So basically I don’t have a dog in this race, and my viewpoint is based purely on my own personal objective opinion.)