They don't increase the cost of pc games because pc games are not optimized for the huge variety of hardware, it's left up to the user to find a set of parameters that works for their setup. PC games do increase the cost you have to spend to get matching performance with their console counterparts. And even then, the optimized console experience offers a far more stable experience over the whole game.

You mess with the settings of a pc game and you run the risk of crashing to desktop or game breaking performance issues. My pc could run The witcher 2 at 1080p, except from some parts with an overload of effects that my gpu hated which made it slow down to sub 5fps, Save, adjust options, restart game.

Console games are expected to work from start to finish with steady performance. As I said before different settings require different optimizations and full testing from start to finish. In case you've followed some of the comparisons between 360 and ps3 last gen, you should know how far those optimizations go with lots of little differences including removing or simplifying objects to keep it playable. What you'll get is a disclaimer at the start of the game, in case of game crashes or bad performance try lowering the settings. The only guaranteed performance will be at 720p30 in that case.

What they could offer is to allow you to turn certain effects off, no AA, no motion blur, or enable v-sync. Changing resolution isn't one of them. And it also depends on the game whether it would be allowed to run faster than 30fps without screwing up the timing or controller input.

I would rather developers focus on giving us great games with good gameplay, story etc. than focus too much on this resolution rubbish. Framerate is more important though as the game would be unplayable otherwise

This sounds like a great idea but you know that every game preview "bullshot" would just have the game set in a way that has 1fps but looks breathtaking and they could happily claim that the screenshot was from actual in game footage.

Meh, totally unnecessary IMO. The only reason you need that in PC games is because the vast difference in the specs of PCs being used to play games, so you need to be able to let people with fairly crappy PCs reduce the performance of the game merely to be able to make the game playable.

Console developers should be maximising resolution and frame rate to the extent possible while not causing performance problems with the game.

To get your 60fps wouldn't you have to do more than just simply dumping the resolution from 1080 to 720? I sounds like it wouldn't be as simple as that.