uh, I'm pretty sure most PC gamers on this site are also console gamers so I don't know where that's from.

I don't disagree with you, as you do have some valid points but it's not so simple to say that consoles hold back the PCs. That depends. In the first few years, they actually don't, but rather developers like it because it makes it easier for them to target a standard hardware and lower common denominator. This generation, the consoles are way ahead of the common PC (not talking about the new 2013-2014 PCs, but the average dating back to 5-10 years!), and they will not be holding the PCs at least for a few years ahead.

But down the road, in about 3-4 years, they start to hold back the PC. It's usually the PC platform itself that holds back the games because of so many different configurations and the old PCs in existence still actively used etc. Last generation, yes the consoles DID HOLD BACK the PCs because they lasted an unpredentedly long period, 7-8 years, so the last 2-3 years were a bit long on the tooth. But why did this happen? It's mostly because of the development costs, both for the game developers / publishers and the platform owners.

However, this generation, I believe it will be quite different simply because all consoles (but wii) now are based on x86 and other PC technologies, with really abundant RAM and everything. From one generation to another, things will simply be scaled up, as in from 1080p to 2160p or 30-60fps to 60-120fps or from 2xAA to 8xAA etc... So PCs will not be held back in that sense, you can simply just get the same game with higher resolution, frame rate, AA, finer detail, which was not possible before.

Also I believe, this generation is really a defining one because of its x86 legacy. Platform owners SHOULD keep it that way, transforming their platforms into supercharged propriety gaming PCs, which are backward compatible with the older games directly transferable. They need to create a scalable PC-like platforms, which will ease up platform cycles a lot, with immensely facilitated development (and programming) periods, and also by creating "network effects" and a "lock-in system" similar to the IOS and Android ecosystems, where your purchases are attached to your account, rather than the machine, and once you buy a game, it must be playable in all future iterations of the platform. So basically a game bought with PS X, must be playable with PS X, PS X+1, PS X+2 and so on, which will create high customer retention and loyalty. Actually the best candidate for this is STEAMBOX.

They definately need DLNA support soon. Then with HEVC H265+VP9 codec support when the time comes.  

Saving around half the bandwidth of H264 with these new codecs seems pretty important to me along with easier HD streaming.

I'm sure all 7 people who buy a Steam Machine will be very happy with it. 

Aparrently you don't know the difference between a gamer and a fanboy...

An 8 core jaguar is roughly equivalent to a Dual-Core Core i3 processor.
Lets not forget that overall it's going to be allot less than a Dual-Core, because not all cores are dedicated to gaming.

Don't expect to have 10's of thousands of CPU/A.I heavy units on screen at once, whilst having amazing physics.
Basically... On the PC side if you still have a 6 year old Core 2 Quad, your CPU is faster than the consoles.

True to an extent.
However, you're only comparing the PC's system Ram.
The majority video memory size is 1Gb or higher on the PC, on consoles that memory is shared. (In future, try to compare it apples to apples.)
Besides, the consoles don't have all 8Gb dedicated to gaming anyway, the Xbox One and Playstation 4 actually use more Ram for their repespective Operating Systems than Windows 7 which is easily a superior OS in terms of flexibility.

Another facet to this is, Ram is relatively cheap, it's not difficult to go buy an 8Gb or 16Gb kit and drop it into any PC, instantly giving it a memory capacity edge.
Some people simply see no need to upgrade from 4-6Gb of Ram for the games they play just yet.

There is always a point of more performance in a fixed hardware environment that's not going to see hardware upgrades for a decade.
Today it may seem ample, but what happens when developers start throwing tasks at the GPU that requires significant amounts of compute? Suddenly there is going to be less resources for displaying pretty images on the screen.
Besides, the PS4 doesn't have all it's games running at 1080P and 60fps anyway, that is something that will probably become a rare thing later on in the generation outside of indie games.
On the PC if you are willing to pay for it, you can run a 16k (3x 4k) monitor set-up, which makes 1080P seem like a last century resolution, thus you have choice, the consoles you do not, you are spoon fed and told what you have to run your games at whether you like it or not.

Games don't need to be designed with that in mind.
Ram doesn't do any form of processing, it's just a super fast piece of memory, no special programming techniques are needed.
High-End GPU's will end up with more and more video memory anyway, I already have more than double the PS4's GDDR5 Ram in total for my graphics cards for instance and 64Gb of System Ram.

Basically, you're saying Microsoft shouldn't have tried to build a different device and instead made a Playstation 4 clone?
Nintendo should have done the same too if that's the case.
Forget competition and innovation with that kind of ideal.

Another thing to keep in mind is the growth rate of PC hardware.
For isntance, it's all well and good to show how the low-end PC's and Average PC's are inferior to your console of choice, but that's a situation that's in flux.

GPU's with 2Gb of Ram or more are seeing the greatest growth.
Systems with 8Gb or more of System Ram are growing the fastest.
Systems with 1080P or higher displays are seeing the largest growth.
Quad Core CPU's are seeing the largest growth.
CPU speeds in excess of 3.3ghz are seeing the largest growth.

Let that sink in for a moment.
Before the Playstation 4 launched, what would be consituted as a low-end PC was actually capable of playing games better than the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, now that the new consoles have launched, we are seeing people upgrade their PC's to meet the new system requirements. (As noted in the Steam statistics.)
In a few years a high-end PC will be a mid-range one, the PS4 will be low-end hardware rather than only 2 year old mid-range hardware, this cycle has continued since PC's and Consoles were able to play games.
Consoles take a jump, PC's continue to advance and take the lead by miles with always more potential performance if you're willing to pay for it.

The Playstation 4 without a doubt is mid-range hardware, it's relative performance to the PC compared to last generation is stupidly massive, my PC is more powerfull than 10x Playstation 4's with extra processing to spare. (In terms of Teraflops.)

Does that mean that performance doesn't really matter and this entire post is unnecessary? 

Sorry to say, but CPU performance on these consoles really isn't up to par compared to any current PC CPU out there. PS4 and XOne are using low-power cores designed to be used in tablets, the lack of single threaded performance won't be helped by the fact they have 8 cores(and only 6 cores usables for gaming, which makes things even worse). Saying a low-end CPU doesn't bottleneck the GPU isn't realistic. For example:

That's quite an extreme case from this review of the MSI GX60 notebook, but you can get the point. This is a similar scenario to what we would get on those new consoles, since the Radeon HD 7970M GPU is comparable to a PS4 one and we have a multitude of different CPUs to compare performance, and I'm quite sure an A10-4600M is a lot more powerful than those 8 Jaguar cores have on PS4 and XOne. Of course, there's a bottleneck to consider on PCs thanks to API's drawcalls, but you can't ignore the huge framerate difference that happens when you use a more powerful processor, the complete lack of CPU performance on PS4 and XOne simply doesn't allow them to be compared to any current PC out there.

Skyrim is a bad example, Bethesda botched the PC version with it's 2 threaded poorly optimised shit.

Console CPUs would be at the bottom of the chart

Here is the thing, I agree with pretty much everything you said, so my arguments will be about trying to shed a light on where exactly I am coming or what perspective I am looking at it from... I have narrowed it down to the highlighted points above...

a) I know I was comparing the system RAM to all of the RAM on the consoles, but hey I did what you suggested also several times, it doesn't change anything, other than altering the numbers slightly. I was saving myself some time from this extra chore. The important thing there is that, whether it be with or without the video RAM, the relative amount of RAM on consoles had never been this abundant. So in terms of memory, in comparison to the PC, this generation is incredible. Again this is not actually a comparison to the PC, but a comparison to the earlier generation playstations compared to the PCs of their generation (so I take the PC as a yardstick for relative performance).

b) When I was saying that the games were not made with this in mind, I was referring to the new technologies such as HUMA in the next consoles, rather than GDDR5 RAM. but it's also likely that designing a game for slow RAM and then extrapolating to fast RAM will not yield the same results as designing it for the fast RAM from the scratch, which will effect the game design etc. Basically all console-specific (idiosyncratic) features will improve the performance.

c) I am not saying MS should have designed a PS clone at all. They tried to scale up the X360 design, and while the RAM increased 8 folds, the ESRAM increased only 3.2x which came at the expensive of compute units etc, crippling the machine. They were obviously very near-sighted and couldn't see the performance they'd get. If they had taken a non unified architecture, with 4 GB DDR3 + 4 GB GDDR5 or something like that (which is nothing like PS4 but rather like PS3), they wouldn't have to sacrifice any performance at all. The main problem today is not actually the 40-50% raw performance deficit (to some extent yes but not the major bottleneck), it's the slow RAM and too small of ESRAM, that's dragging the system down.