It's a multi-tiered question really. Naturally, a lot of people are going to try to declare when a hardware generation ends to prop up their own beliefs and claims.
On one end, there are the end tallies: when production stops on a given console, those are the final numbers whether it sold for 2 years or 12. No company keeps a platform in production if it continues to lose money or software support completely dries up, so in that sense, the market and the consumers determine when this happens. Can the final numbers be ignored simply to support a personal opinion? Not really. Not legitimately anyway. They still matter even after replacement products become available.
On the other end, there is such a thing as market relevancy, meaning there is a point at which the numbers lose their significance for anything other than as a product that continues to generate revenue for the parent company. Past a certain point, how well a piece of hardware sells relative to competing products, no longer determines developer support or even future developer support for follow up hardware platforms. This is the product cycle stage the 7th hardware generation is currently in. It will continue well after all 8th gen consoles are on the market.
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