Except for some game developers and game journalists, no one cares about having a "pure" game machine. Actually, the opposite.
So basically they are building -Sony, Valve and Nintendo included- that living room PC, that living room computer that does it all, because the market is asking for it: no one likes to have four boxes, 15 cables, a remote dying from switching input everyday and different UI/UX between each machine, which is the current situation for a lot of people.
Under this light, I think the Xbox One is technically strong with a software layer/integration with mobile and tablets that competition doesn’t really have and is extremely complex to build.
For the rest, well I don’t care. I told you thousands of time that proprietary, closed platforms should be avoided as much as possible. This is where to me I’d rather have people buy Win8 licenses and stay hardware and distribution free because when a company owns the hardware, software and distribution you really are in a different position that we game developers -outside the 0.1% studios which can tackle that kind of game production- don’t want to be in again amirite? I mean if we ever learn from our mistakes, musician mistakes, directors mistakes etc. That’s a lot of facts now.
As creators we want to be on top, not below. There’s another thing.
Legacy.
This is Tera: City of Skulls, a 1986 French RPG DOS game from Loriciel running on Windows 8, flawlessly. I’m so used to that level of backward compatibility I don’t know how you do, guys. It’s fucking fantastic.
As time passes by the ability to have a real memory, a real library of our gaming past is more and more awesome and it will become more and more important as population ages especially with inter-generational links around computer game culture, especially with hundreds, thousands of dollars spent on game downloads you can’t transfer. It’s not just about legacy, it’s about having your mind at ease knowing that you will not get screwed, maybe ever. People are searching for solutions when they see that all of their 60 bucks games will not run on MS and Sony’s next boxes. The backlash’s started.
Which is why you should -no offense to console companies- stay the fuck away of these consoles. Games are everywhere and the most diverse, thriving, stable place to play is still a Windows PC. Or Steam, if you prefer to call it this way but it’s not just Steam, though.