The OP made the point that we must compare a $350-$400 PC with a console. My point is that a pc does more than a console and therefore will cost more. Having said that a $400 PC can be built that does everything a console does and the extra things a PC does. So even within your fault framework such an argument doesn't hold.

PC mustard race, because CONsoles can't ketchup, anymore!!!

I laugh when I read people talking about emulation like its an easy thing to do. If people really knew what they were talking about with regards to emulation then they would know why its silly to even mention it.

The layman will say, "but hey, my PC is (insert number of times here) more powerful than the PS2/PS3. It would be a breeze emulating it". Or, "the XB1/PS4 is based on 64bit PC architecture. Watch me emulate it on my uber powerful gaming rig"

Nonsense.

The only way to accutately emulate anything (especially x86 hardware) is if you have the hardware inbuilt into a system or you have all the documentation for all the algorithms for that particular hardware set up. Not just the processor, but how the procesor communicates with its specific RAM set up, clocks IO bus...etc. The problem is not having hardware powerful enough to run the emulation, its getting software that your hardware can run. And its  acompletely different can of worms when you are trying to emulate hardware based on entirely different architectures from what you are running.

When people say X86, they make it sound like its just on particular type of code base... they couldn't be more wrong. Thats why till this day its extremely hard to emulate the OG xbox. And all this is made evenmore complicated by about a thousand fold when going from X86 to X64 hardware. Till this day, the full documentation of X86/64 is not even known.

This is not saying that with enough people on it emulation of the PS4/Xb1 will not be possible, but by the time that happens, we would probably be on the PS6/XB3.

A PC that has 1 Teraflop is identical to a console that has 1 Teraflop, there is no "requires less or more".

Flops or "Floating Point Operations" is a type of math which Central Processing Units and Graphics Processing units sometimes process.
However, game engines, processors, graphics processing units also deal with other types of math such as integers or will have varying precisions/types of floating point. (For example, half precision floating point or iterative refinement.)

Thus by extension, if you have say... A consoles GPU like what is in the Playstation 4 which has theoretically 50% more floating point than the Xbox One, but the Xbox One has (Figuratively)  50% more integer performance than the Playstation 4, then a game which relys more heavily on integer's is going to actually have better performance on the XBox One in regards to math.

However, there is also more to graphics processing than just math anyway, but you get the idea, it's simply not as black and white as people think it is, it's difficult/impossible to grab a singular number as a performance comparison point between different hardware as there is many more facets to look at.

In general, if you see people using "flops" as a way to gauge total differences in performance, then you know they are pretty much clueless on the topic and should be ignored.

Emulating the origional Xbox is hard because the amount of people interested in working on such a thing is pretty much non-existent.
What is the point in emulating an entire platform that shares the majority of it's game library (Most of it's exclusives were on PC, well the notable ones.) with every other platform? Halo? Halo 2? They were released on PC.
Abe? Yep, was on PC.

However, emulating the origional Xbox is technically an easier affair than say... The Playstation 2, simply because there is no need to interpret instructions, which in some cases needs to be split up multiple times before being executed.
There is no need to "Pretend" for the PC 's hardware to essentially, in-a-way pretend it's different hardware completely.

Xbox One and Playstation 4 will come easier and faster, with less of a performance hit, there is simply less guesswork required for the hardware, no need to split/interpret differing instructions, etc'.
The hard part will come with the OS's, the Playstation 4 and Xbox One has became more PC-like in it's complexity, not just with the hardware, but the software stacks too, which will be difficult for people to reverse engineer as they are pretty monolothic.

And this is the nonsense (sorry, just getting really frustrated) that Pc gamers keep bringing into this argumnet. What else you can or can't do with a PC has nothing to do with playing a game or not playing a game on a PC. That has no bearing on this discussion at all. 

If someone has only $500-$700 to spend on a device. And his primary reason for wanting to buy this device is to play games. He may already have a laptop that does everything he wants a PC to do or even just a tablet that he is content with or God forbid a phone. He just wants something to play his games on now. This person is faced with two options. Buy a console, or buy/build a dedicated gaming rig. Its that simple. Nothing more, nothing less.

Whatever he bought the device for is what he would use the device for the most. My PS4, can also do more than just play games. But all I care about is its ability to play games. And at the end of the day, if I post a screenshot here of my  PS4 running COD:AW and you post a screenshot of yours. And yours looks better. If you are asked, what are you running that on, your answer would be an overclocked pentium cpu and a $190 GPU with 8GB RAM. The answer to that question will not entail how well your PC can run word or photoshop. Cause the only thing we are talking about here is that screenshot of the game you posted.

If he is better of building a PC withhis $700, if playing on PCs are better, if it would cost him les down the road... are all irrelevant to this particular topic. This isn't about which platform is better or how much you spent. That is not what i meant by $350-$400 consoles. What I meant is that $350-$400 represents an estimate of what the hardwrae costs inside the console. So if its performance is being compared to a PC running a game, its only fair that itbe compared to a PC with a similar "hardware" price point. If you read my last few posts in one of them a clearly described exactly what I mean.

Yeah agree, all depend on the game and which hardware optimize for, but the different is still there, but it doesn't worth the money to upgrade the high end GPU on PC. if you only looking for small benefit like 900p on console to 1080p on PC, or from high setting on console to ultra setting on PC. All the game for this 3 until 4 years will look the same (the same shader technology and effect )

when you comparing console vs console on terafolp or GPU vs GPU the rule is applied because it work the same, but the console vs PC comparison regarding the teraflop the rule will be different and it doesn't work by comparing directly. 

You need performance comparison as well, Euro gamer with digital foundry like site to compare, beside hardware knowledge you also need to know how the games work on each system (digital foundry is work closely with developer to get the info how the games work on each platform)

Like i said 1 teraflop is the same like one teraflop in console, but how teraflop is needed to achieve is different on each platform, and thus making comparison is more difficult and unfair.

I am not sure, but I think what he is referring to is that consoles are more efficent. In other words. I console can do more with 1TF of power than a PC. Simply cause the console has less overall overhead to worry about and that whole closer to the metal crap. Kinda how mantle improves the performace of specific hardware. Its no like that hardware suddenly gave birth to some more transitors. Matle just makes the PC more efficient at utilizing the power it has.

So in a twisted laymans sense of it, he is actually right.

Yeah, thanks for the help, that's what i really want to tell to him :D

at that time Xbox original work with direct x under the hood but the way it works is different and even know the original one is still hard to emulate.

you can imagine the PS4 and Xbox one  run on differnt GUI (early Xbox One  still depend on Direct X) and work on code close to metal will make difficult to emulate, not even mention that both is heavily modified GPGPU (only few people use GPGPU for gaming ), especially PS4.