Well, Amiga won the battle with the Atari ST, the c64 won battling the ZX spectrum, the Amiga CD32 game console was outselling PC CDROM, MegaCD, CDi and C= was unable to meet demand until C= finally went out of business.
Sure entry prices matter a lot, but one important reason why Nintendo won several console generations was not due to their consoles being less powerfull, it's due to their excellent popular franchises which kids, me included, loved to play. I loved Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior on the Coleco vision and Mario Bros on the c64. Super Mario was a very appealing yet a not very demanding game like Tetris and Pacman were in the early days.
I think it can be argued which console was really the least powerful this last generation, I have yet to see anything coming close to God of War 2. The PS2 being harder to port multi-platform games to does not make it less powerful per se, as the Amiga had similar problems when games weren't designed with the Amiga's powerful architecture in mind. I think of the last generation, all the consoles had their strenghts and weaknesses.
