I just wish sony and ms would do gaming, and do it well rather than foray into "taking over the living room", videos, media etc etc.
Agreed about extensibility etc though, the xbox seems to have got that one right. Guitar hero was one reason I bought my xbox.
I still feel slightly dirty having things with "microsoft" written on them in the house though :/
Maybe with the next playstation they'll just go back to making a good games console instead of trying to push bluray.
Shame sega and atari fell so early on though.
Just realized I'm writing in weird disconnected sentences - I'll never make a blogger.
I also occasionally watch the MSNBC in the Media Center part, but man is that an awful experience. It's really buggy at times, and I have an insanely fast internet connection. I can't imagine what it's like for the average user.
At the same time, I agree with the ancestral poster: I wish that Microsoft and Sony held more reverence for gaming. I say this as somebody who wants to be a game developer: right now, gaming is easily the most disregarded artistic medium. Most games are sequels or spin-offs or rip-offs, have been for two generations. There are some games that rise to the top - the Katamari series and Shadow of the Colossus both showed, on a mediocre system, just how hilarious/moving a good game can be - but even most of the top-name games are awful. The writing and character graphics of Fallout 3 made me cringe on quick glance.
Part of it is that games have become a generic commodity. You have the shooter genre, the RPG genre, the sports genre, the racing genre, and games compete to be the best of each every generation, and it's always the same groups competing. You don't have this treatment of a game as an art form.
Unlike movies where you start off in theaters, unlike TV shows which start off as incremental releases, with games the release is the release and that's the only release. Games lose their mysticism an hour after they've launched. It's terribly demeaning of the entire medium, the way things stand right now. And it hurts both the developers and the consumers to have games treated so matter-of-fact. It kills something that ought to be magical.
I've been gunning to cancel cable for about two years now, without blowing a wad to do it (ideally I want to come out ahead within a year); early adopters who don't want to spend a ton should start looking at what they actually use the TV for, consider what they watch and where they can find it, and start running the math. Now if I could just get some sort of decent fiber-based internet...
I don't even bother with Netflix. You can download any new releases, often before you can find the DVDs (especially during Oscar season, when all of those screeners end up leaked) and full seasons of any TV shows. You do usually miss out on the commentary though if you're into that.
Not to mention, what more could you want in a console? Both seem to be able to provide games all the horsepower they need to do whatever developers can dream up at this point. They're tremendously extensible platforms. The Xbox 360 even uses USB ports, meaning you can develop whatever hardware you want for it with ease, as Rock Band and company have.
I would say that the state of console gaming now has less to do with them than the game developers.