Plus, the 1080p TV standard isn't going anywhere until the broadcast standards change. Seeing as how they're currently set at 720p/1080i (and most people are keenly aware of how long that transition took), it's pretty hard to imagine broadcast standards changing anything before that 7-11 years you estimated. 

Realistically, we'd probably see consoles that can push out 1080p video to 2 or 3 HDTVs (separate signals, not mirrored) before seeing a console that utilizes a 4k display. And even then, I don't know who would have such a set up in their living room barring the same type of consumer currently gaming on a 2 or 3 monitor set up for PC games. 

Considering that the next generation of consoles probably won't even be able to render a stereoscopic 1080p signal at 60fps, talk of 4k display support seems even more pointless. 

I was implying that the gen after next will have to worry about 4k

What, in 2020? Won't we all be flying around in anti-gravity saucers and playing cloud based video games on helium powered servers by then?

I guess it's all a question of bang for your buck, and whether or not the big 3 will make the right decisions in offering both a good range of processing power given today's TV tech, and a competitive price. I think the cube was a good yardstick to compare to. It was high-end, and it was affordable. That's all we're asking for really.

Except that, while the Gamecube was a high performance system, it was fairly outdated hardware that achieved high performance by being very efficient and developers optimizing engines for it.

People (often) whine because the hardware some of these systems are made using isn't as high performance as the PC components they can buy but never seem to consider that the PC is designed to be a modular platform and sacrifices a lot of efficiency to be modular, and (due to the massive number of combinations of PC componenets) developers never optimize their engines to take advantage of particular hardware.

Beyond this, there are certain features that have been added to GPUs to make them more efficient since the PS3 and XBox 360 launched. Tesselation alone should translate into higher detailed environements and further draw distances while rendering the same number of polygons. When you then add twice the detail and twice the processing power for effects while rendering at 1080p@60fps there should be a nice boost in quality.

I know a large portion of my post wasn't really directly related to your post, but I think most people are focused on the "PS3" or "XBox" design methodology and tend to ignore how the Gamecube was built; and making a system more efficient rather than more powerful benefits everyone.

I remember reading alot about this back when Nintendo used the Gecko CPU and Flipper card. The architecture was heavily adapted to these tailored pieces of hardware to make the Cube awesome as it was. Hopefully Nintendo is doing the same here, but it still is nice to compare baselines (say one graphics chip's baseline spec over another), wouldn't you agree, or is there even variability here, where a better GPU could be less tailored than a weaker one?

Summary: “Avatar was rendered on supercomputers”  Yes, I realize that, but they are not rendering at near the resolution of Avatar at 1080p.

And since the 4K TV's are coming out, and 1440p monitors are already out, and have been for a couple of years.  It would be sad to have a consol that is already rather dated before it even his it's first major price break.

Not too many people at 720P TV’s when the Xbox 360 came out. Yes they were out, but more of an ‘elite’ TV, like the 4K will be in a few years.  And all the X360 games are developed at 720p.

Look - I'm not saying that they Xbox 720 will have 'Cameron’s Avatar' level graphics.  Although, being rendered several years ago, with ‘Moore’s Law’ things have improved much since that time.  And the Xbox 360 is equivalent of a super computer less than two decades ago.  And if it comes out in 2013 that’s nearly 5 years since Avatar was rendered.

 I'm just point out that there is plenty of room to improve 1080p if that's all it can do.  But there also to seems to be tradition that the target should be the new TV's coming out.