How exactly is that relevant to this discussion?
People think that just because you stick parts inside of a proprietary box you get some kind of free performance increase because of "optimization". Generally in the past the delta between consoles at launch vs PCs of the day has been because of the highly customized parts designed specifically for the console boxes and the high level of specialization. Consoles played games and didn't need to devote resources towards anything else.
In addition there was a fairly level playing field in terms of thermals and power draw. PCs weren't sucking down wattage and so consoles could roughly match them in terms of transistor count and design complexity.
All of this is different now.
1. Consoles next gen are going to get parts either directly off the shelf or only lightly customized for their use. The cost of R&D in the semiconductor space has skyrocketed, and the parts made for PC and mobile are good enough that there's no real benefit to coming up with your own silicon from scratch. This sea change actually came during the design process for the current gen, but Nintendo threw a monkey wrench into the works by going with overclocked Gamecube chips and Sony obviously cost themselves a boatload of money by betting badly with Cell and tossing the RSX in at the last minute.
The 360 got a prototype unified shader GPU but you won't be seeing this happen next time. Both MS and Sony are going with AMD-based GPU designs and there's nothing far enough along in production that could conceivably go into for the new consoles. They're getting GCN architecture, the only question is transistor count and clock speed.
2. Consoles aren't as specialized anymore. The current offerings all do a lot more than just play games and everyone in the hardware space is doubling down on this for the future. We're going to get boxes that try to do everything and thus have to devote CPU clocks and RAM space to OS level functionality. This will ultimately reduce the resources available to games.
In addition there won't be as much low-level coding as there has been in the past. Everyone's concentrating on multiplatform releases which means higher levels of coding abstraction and less platform-specific optimization. More middleware also means less programming to the metal. Ballooning budgets will take their toll here too, but I'm just concentrating on the technical aspects here.
3. As I mentioned, thermal draw is possibly the biggest factor. High end PCs have power supplies that can draw over 1000W and GPUs that take up a substantial fraction of that. Consoles will simply not be able to measure up.
It's not my intention to really disparage the consoles here. For the amount of money you'll spend I'm sure both Sony and MS will be providing a better experience than buying a $300-400 PC (for the first year or two anyway), and developers will (stupidly IMO) still be putting out console-only games that you just can't get on PC.
But when you're talking purely in technical terms, I think it's pretty safe to say that Durango and Orbis will definitely not be able to measure up.
