@(assorted) You all have very good points regarding the Cell. I'm not certain I agree 100% with all of them, but most of them are valid nonetheless.
One poster pointed out that the issue of console generations really boils down to money, and the consumer willingness to upgrade, which is essentially what I was trying to get at. Using a comparison of the Cell's upgradability vs the 360's upgradability was an error -- this isn't really the critical issue, although I personally believe that it plays a reasonably important role, with regards to money. I believe that MS will be forced into losing BC, because they cannot actually upgrade the 360 architecture to be BC affordably. BC would be more important in the short-term, I believe -- mostly because, unlike the PS2, I don't believe the 360 will remain in production past the introduction of a NextBox (I could be totally wrong here though). I don't believe Sony will necessarily have to lose BC with its next console, since the architecture may be very similar.
I don't think the next gen of consoles will be as great a leap forward, in regards to raw computing power, as tis gen was over the last, or every generation has been over its predecessor, to this point. Although the PS2 and PS3 have supported BC through hardware, I believe a software solution may be necessary for the next gen of the 360, and if the architecture is even more radically changed that the 360s was over the XBox, BC will become nigh impossible.
Without BC, MS would upset not only consumers, but also developers who spend 10s of millions on engine development over a consoles lifetime. That's also going to cost dev time, and quality for new titles, in the short-term (as it did for both the 360 and the PS3... especially the PS3, since the change was more radical, IMO).
It would be a serious financial error, IMO, to release a high-end console by 2011, that (I hate bullet points, since they seem to aggravate readers, but I want people to be able to read through the post quickly if they want):
(a) costs a ton to develop, because its a completely new architecture, and...
(b) loses BC, and thus upsets users who purchased a 360 not very many years ago, and...
loses developers, temporarily, who need to throw away their software architectures and start anew, and...
(d) loses developers, permanently, who already have a working PS3 software architecture that may be upgradable to the PS4, and...
(e) (this is probably the most important point) focuses on the smaller market share (the high-end), when the current base 360 architecture is perfectly capable of becoming the next Wii by 2011, with some simple additions, like a BD drive (this would one-up the Wii, and should be cheap by then), a built-in HDD, a smaller case, lower power consumption, and a pointing device (the number of RTS games coming to the 360 practically beg for such a thing).
I think the next console generation from MS will be another 360, given these points. I guess you could say both that the "next gen" could arrive by 2010/2011 and that it doesn't, in that way. Shane Kim's point about the 360 lasting 7 years may very well mean exactly this -- the 360 can continue to compete for 7 years, and there just won't be a need for MS to tackle the challenges of a new architecture until much later.
