I agree that development cost are increasing in an alarming speed. I even made a thread about it. But that's purely the 3rd party devs and publishers fault, not Sony, MS or Nintendo per se, they simple can't be satisfied with 1-2 million sales and have to go numbers way higher than that, which are very hard to achieve. And that's one of the things that might "killed" gaming, at least in terms of AAA tittles.
As for the rest of your points I kinda agree with you, I mean Sony and Nintendo have both made some really stupid choices with the Vita and the Wii U respectively. So what have happen to this consoles won't necessarily reflect the 720 and the PS4, I think marketing is one of the most important aspects of this.
I made some comments about how multimedia features will be a selling point of next gen consoles, but now that I think about it, those things won't help much (if at all), because most people will already have a tablet or a laptop that does those things, so there's no need to invest $350+
In the end all that matters in terms of consoles and handhelds are the games, it doesn't matter if you have the best graphics in the world or all the multimedia features, if you don't have the games, what's the point? People buy consoles and handhelds because of games, all the extra stuff are just secondary things, that applies to both 'core' and 'casual' gamers.
Nintendo and PC gamer
