No, I'm not sure it can quite get upto a 680 power wise. With optimisation it probably could, but they haven't really had enough time to optimise

Honestly, I think we're gonna be surprised at what the Nextbox's specs are gonna be. I fully expect them to surprise us like Sony did with their PS4 announcement.

But the thing that worries me is if we won't be  seeing the best that next-gen has to offer. This was no problem for the Xbox 360 since it was ahead of its time and next-gen engines (at the time) were able to be fully taken advantage of. But if it turns out next-gen consoles aren't able to fully take advantage of next-gen engines (UE4 in this case), then the graphical jump won't be as high as can be if these consoles were based on current high-end PC specs. 

Ack, of course PC will look better. A beast of a PC will always, no exception, have more power than the latest consoles. If that wasn't the case, consoles would cost 5 times as much, and be taken over within a year anyway, when the next iteration of hardware comes out for PC.

All I heard for the meeting was "Blizzard" I then went into pleasure overload. SOLD!

Actually, the PS4 specs weren't a surprise, as the rumors turned out to be true.  The only thing people weren't sure about was the RAM.  It was rumored to have only 4GB, but Sony was toying with the idea of upping it to 8GB because devs were asking for it.  So, I expect the NeXbox rumors to be true, as well.  They don't want as powerful of a GPU to help keep costs down, since it is rumored they are sticking a Kinect 2 in every box.  Which means I won't be surprised again. 

To your second point, no, consoles are always slightly behind the higher end PCs when they come out.  And I'm sure they could run UE3 better than the 360, too.  But, it is dedicated HW, so developers learn how to use the system to the best of its abilities, which leads to games that still look great.  Still behind the higher PCs, though.  Of course, most gamers don't care about that.

I dunno, I've read that at the time the Xbox 360 was released it was more powerful (or at least just as powerful) than high-end PCs at the time.

Of course it's going to look better on the PC, but not by much really, you have to take into account that the shot you have linked to was taken for marketing purposes on the PC a long time ago and there's no GPU that could run it at that level and maintain a good frame rate (maybe the new nvidia TITAN could, but that costs $1000 dollars/£750 alone.

That shot is also rendered at a resolution higher than 1080p for the PC screen shot and the PS4 screenshot is possibly taken direct from the PS4 announcement feed, so will be compressed with a video codec and will look better than that.

I mean take Crysis 3 for example, screenshots of that look incredible but go and check the benchmark websites for how it runs on high on the latest cards, mostly in the sub 20s for frames per second.

I think it will look a lot better than that when the PS4 drops.

I disagree, I'm not sure what Microsoft can do to beat those specs announced the other day, certainly can't beat the RAM bandwidth or quantity, which in turn is linked to the bandwidth the GPU has access too, it may be able to come close but likely a fair bit lower. I don't believe there's a chance it can beat them and be sold at a competetive price at launch. I have no idea how the PS4 is even going to be released at the $400 dollar price point personally but it looks like it will be. I'd happily pay $500 for what they announced.

We should all be happy and congratulating Sony that they haven't gone the route many feared and released a console that could have been released a couple of years ago in terms of specs.

only because it was the first system to use the all new unified shader architecture, but this time around there is no such thing to boost your performance

and the PC market has changed a lot, the highest performance components now are way way more expensive than they were back then - you can buy a $900 graphics card (or 4 of them) and a $1000 CPU and have a monstrous system (and that's about what PC sites use for gaming benchmarks)

back in 2005 there were premium components allright, but the edge they had in performance was maybe ~10%, while now it can be 50 or more % seperating "mid-tier"(~$150 graphics card + $150 CPU) from "high-end"

We´re entering the era of diminishing return, where you need a lot more processing power (and money) than before, to produce a similar jump in the quality of the graphics. The ps4 specs are in reality in the range of a mid-tier pc of today.