Except developers would have to change how they operate. Games on consoles are not designed to _scale_ with the hardware, they are designed to work on specific specs. You would see some what you saw with the N64 XPAK. Higher resolutions but lower performance. Or in the case of an upgraded video card, higher prices, more failed hardware, worse software.

I don't see a difference, as they are all peripheral devices. The only difference is that the EP boots hardware performance significantly. So I fail to see how your assuming that people wouldn't have time for better hardware and games.

No. If I wanted that just go to PC gaming. Part of appeal of consoles is I can buy one thing and know it can play all the game made for it next several years. Nice and simple.

Sweet Brown always knows what to say!

it's a terrible idea because it fragments your market. i mean, if it were something that weren't necessary and could always be utilized even on games that were released before the addon is released, then sure that's great. for example, upgrading from a 5400rpm to a 7200rpm hdd for faster loading times.  or something like that gameboy player addon that let you play gba games on your gamecube.  stuff like that is great

but something like more RAM? you only really benefit from that if the game was designed to utilize it and requires it. it just splits up your userbase which is a flatout bad idea. the purpose of consoles is to standardize the hardware for the developers to develop on, not the other way around

Well one of the reasons is what could you upgrade with a add-on these days? You could possibly add BC pretty easily but when it comes to CPU / GPU / RAM your going to have massive bottlenecks with bus speeds and it would several layers of complexity and overhead to engines.