Taking a step back this reminds me a lot of discussing elections with people emotionally invested in the outcome. They are so sure their candidate will win because they love them and everyone they know loves them, heck maybe their whole town or state love them.
Then you sit down and show how electoral maps works with demographics and projections and how their candidate has one path to victory, and that being everything going their way. Meanwhile, their opponent can almost cruise and has 5-7 paths to victory and can even suffer a setback and be okay.
What inevitably happens if they swear the one path will happen and millions of others will just change because they desperately think being impassioned gives their vote more weight than someone who casually picks on a whim.
My point?
Right now Microsoft is on the defensive and has almost no shot at leading globally. They have one swing region (North America) that they need to win huge and one country (UK) within a losing region they need to win huge to keep the region somewhat close. They have another long shot in China to try and keep Asia close, and really not many options pretty much anywhere else.
I have no doubt Microsoft will fight like crazy to keep NA, but add up all the other regions and hard to see many third parties pass up the PS4 and its installed base. I just don't see Microsoft's first party being persuasive enough compared to Sony's to convert many after the first 10 months have seen such a significant early gap already develop,
