I've got to respectfully disagree with the OP. In my opinion, now more than ever especially, there won't be any definitive point in time where we can say, "Hey guys look! The next gen has started!" Because of the nature of the internet we're actually seeing a gradual transition into what the next gen should look like and the infrastructure for this has already been planted. To me, for next gen, I envision seamless integration to cloud based services (PSNow, XBCloud), multitasking, the ability to start a game instantly, pause it, turn the console off and instantly resume, but more importantly how we're going to come to interact with video games. I think that Project Morpheus will be the true start of Sonys next gen and if it's first iteration is adopted well enough we might see it become an integral part of the system; I'd say the same for Microsoft but it seems like they're actually stepping away from the Kinect.
Either way, to me, Next Gen starts with how we're going to be interacting with our games and all the wonderful things we'll be able to achieve through broadband internet.







