I think Sony did well in coming first because people are going to compare what MS will present to what Sony presented and no the other way around.
Supposing MS does the exact same thing, people will no longer be impressed even if it is as good. That is a Sony victory.

Where Sony didn`t win is that, set aside 3rd parties and what did Sony really show? 4 1st party games and none were system sellers.
Killzone never did anything special for PS3 despite all the hype. inFamous the same thing. Drive Club looks good but it`s not a system seller and Knack will probably do the same for PS4, what R&C did for PS3.
In terms of exclusives/1st party games the conference didn`t show anything special.

MS might be faced with the same situation when they announce the next Xbox. Will probably announce the same 3rd party games as Sony and a few 1st party games. The question is what will those be.

So, in regards to the OP question, it`s a yes and a no.

After all these whiners I bet MS makes a big deal about showing their box like "and now we're actually going to show you what you'll be buying since apparently that matters to just a few consumers /sarcascm"
And Xbox fanboys will rub it in everyone's faces, the irony being that it will make absolutely zero difference if you know what a console looks like nearly a year before it releases. I'm sure they'll show at E3 and give online pricing info which is the thing I'm most curious about that they could have cleared up (does + carry over? Do I pay for Gaikai? Do I pay for spectating?)

E3 will be big this year. No doubt about dat.

Sony didn't really announce or show off anything unexpected besides 8gb GDDR5...

You obviously didn't read what I wrote, they didn't show the "box" because they wan't to keep your attention for e3, as they have made microsoft use some ideas from e3 to fill up there announcment because sony used the 3rd party footage they wanted too

yeah of course they just showed 8gb GDDR5 for like 2 hours and 4 mins.......Ridiculous comment

To be honest, i wasnt too impressed.
I liked that you can stream to the Vita, i didnt like at all that theres no backwards compatability. It means that instead of a PS4 i will probably get a PS3... and wait until the PS4 is cheaper and has more games. In that regard i think they made the same mistake they did with the Vita. They are not giving people the option to upgrade, they are just giving a different proposition, wich is obviously a harder sell.

Read my post. I didn't say that they didn't announce anything besides the RAM. I said that was the only unexpected announcement. Everything else was pretty much par for the course.

So you expected Bungie to show exclusive content, blizzard to turn up , The witness, drive club etc etc?

I expected them to push the cloud and social gaming, I expected them to show tech demos of new engines, I expected them to show off indie games, I expected them to show off third party multigenerational titles, I expected those multigenerational titles to be better on the PS4, I expected them to show off a racing game(it'd been rumoured before), I expected at least one new Sony IP, and  expected them to have several developers worshiping their machine. They delivered on all of that, which is in no way a bad thing, but there were no "OMG" moments for me. I guess Diablo 3 was kind of a surprise, though. I kinda forgot about that one. Oh, and SE's portion came as quite a shock as well. ;)