True, college licenses are gravy.
However, if you want to stay legal you can't use them when you leave college or after three (or five?) years (at least, over where I live) .
But the point was (and is) that for most people a PC does include windows. And that does boost the price by say, $100 or so. And, if we're going to keep fair about the PC's uberness you should note that a budget PC will require a GFX card upgrade relatively quickly if you want to keep up the frame-rates.
At least, that is my experience with cheaper GFX cards.
The consoles don't have that because their games won't demand stronger hardware over time. Naturally if you keep your PC up to date it'll beat out the GFX of the consoles, but it will cost you more than just the initial PC plus the games over the course of a console generation.
A nice example here would be the PS2 - horribly outdated GFX by now, yet the latest games that come out for it still play normally. And that is after eight years. No PC made eight years ago can play todays PC games even moderately well.
See, I do have a PC. I love playing the odd game on it, but I also know I spend more money upgrading/replacing PC's during the last few years than I spend on the consoles I bought during them ;)
