This. PS2 and PS1 are old enough that the PS4 should be able to emulate them with little to no problems, but the x86 PS4 and Xbone will never be able to play the PPC based PS3 and 360 games natively. Unless you enjoy playing games at 3fps. Using x86 architecture was a good financial choice because it's cheap, but if they had used PPC there would be full 7th gen backwards compatibility and every game would run at 1080p 60fps.

So i take it this is why (or at least one of the big reasons) there was no backwards compatibility.

See, there is one thing though with this. I can understand Disney remastering it's classics... like someof them at 20+ years or older and they were wonderful movies for both kids and adults. in 20 yers, there is a whole new generation and new technology. I doubt a lot of people have VCRs anymore to wathc the really old classics so remastering them, cleaning them up works great. As for Sony here... they are "remastering" games that are a year old simply because they sold well and they know people will buy them and it takes them less time and a lot less money to make them and they know they will probably make more over all than the orignal did espeically for games like TLOU. It is just... odd. If it was some of their PS1 games, yeah, by all means, go ahead and remaster those but games that are a year to5 years old? No.

This. PS2 and PS1 are old enough that the PS4 should be able to emulate them with little to no problems, but the x86 PS4 and Xbone will never be able to play the PPC based PS3 and 360 games natively. Unless you enjoy playing games at 3fps. Using x86 architecture was a good financial choice because it's cheap, but if they had used PPC there would be full 7th gen backwards compatibility and every game would run at 1080p 60fps.

Xbox 360 doesn't actually use emulation in the same way, you can't put in any game and have it work some of the time.  It uses profiles for very specific games, in order to work.  So, they make a Halo profile so they can run Halo, and a Halo 2 profile to be able to run Halo.  But a game without a profile won't work.  

Hardware emulation that way is expensive.  Let's say Sony is losing 1$ on each system as is.  Now to add a chip, let's say it is a 20$ chip, so now they are losing 21$ on each system.  Then consider they are making millions of systems.  1 million systems, that is $21 million lost.  See how millions add up pretty quickly?

The original Xbox was x86 and the X360 was PPC and it managed to do backwards compatibility through software emulation.  Is the reverse really so impossible?

They also could have just added a Cell chip to the PS4 like the early PS3 models which had an Emotion Engine chip for PS2 backwards compatibility.

I know I would.