...Found this article from The Escapist.com. Thought it was an interesting read from someone in the industries thought on the current generation of consoles. Check it out...

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/op-ed/5263-Going-Gold-Console-War-What-is-It-Good-For

The lulz.

* Yes, it pained me to type that word.

I stopped reading after the writer hypothesized that this generation was over half-way done. Yeah, right.

Yeah, I think the point he's trying to put across is that the industry as a whole is pushing this gen out the door qiucker then any previous one. I'm not sure HOW many people actually believe this gen will last another 7 to 8 years, to me LET alone 3. =/

I'm inclined to agree.

From this point on, consoles will end up seeing a diminishing point of returns as technology continues to improve.

Yes, they can be more capable from the technology standpoint, but the improvements will be less pronounced and the full potential less apt to be fully realized by most developers, simply due to the costs involved in taking advantage of the optimal output the hardware is capable of producing.

Sure, true photorealistic graphics with multi-level ray tracing are only a generation or two away, but the man hours involved in producing such content would be prohibitive to only the most well funded development studios and would have to produce commercial success to justify the expense involved. 

Eventually, the restriction becomes the amount of artists needed to produce the content that fills the environments, characters, objects, etc. rather than just the cost of the tools used in production.

Interfaces that improve upon the way players interact with their games seems to be where the industry is leaning towards, with the success of the Wii, so the next gen may well just provide an improvement over the current functional, yet still somewhat crude control scheme of the Wii.

So... improved Wii-like controls and modest bumps in processing power (Nintendo's next console will probably show the most improvement over the 6.5 gen Wii) and hardware resources due to Moore's Law and subsequent cheaper cost of components.

Why only modest? Simple: cost. Current gen has demonstrated once again, the limited viability of a spare-no-expense approach to hardware design.

I'll definitely agree with this, too - at least on the audiovisual front.

From the start, consoles were trying to catch up to the standards of their time. From the first consoles in the 1970s, televisions always displayed in 480i, and speakers had been outputting stereo sound for a while, but the display resolutions and sound chips of early consoles were abysmal in comparison. (The Atari 2600, for example, output in 192x160 and only supported two channels of mono sound.) Gradually, consoles began to catch up; the Nintendo 64 was the first console to support games running in true 480i, and the Dreamcast and PS2 featured full 480i support. Around that time, televisions began to include the emerging Progressive Scan (480p) and 16x9 widescreen formats, and consoles followed suit; some games on the DC and PS2 supported the standard, and most games on the GameCube and Xbox supported at least one of those.

Then, finally, we have this generation, where HDTVs were just beginning to emerge as the new standard. The Xbox 360 and PS3 immediately took advantage of that standard, and both are capable of displaying in true 1080p on many games.

On the audio front, by the SNES generation, every console included stereo sound, and the Xbox and PS2 were the first to include digital audio (though only the first of those is capable of true Dolby Digital sound). Again, the 360 and PS3 are capable of true Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound on all games.

So, where do we go from here, then? We've basically maxed out everything that HDTVs are capable of, and few people have more than a 5.1 surround sound system for increasing raw sound output capability to matter. PC games like Crysis show us that there is still a little more "oomph" that consoles can push on the graphical front, but with people already complaining that this generation isn't enough of a graphical leap over the old one, a little is far, far from enough.

That means that the only front left, until the television or audio industry foists a new standard on us, is new methods of interaction. That's why many people consider the Wii the only "true" next-gen system.