Yes I agree with your points.  People often overlook the cost of the OS, a controller, and a good gaming keyboard and mouse.  Sometimes just those three cost as much as a console .

I was going to make a thread recently on the topic of comparisons between PC & Console.  In a way I think it's incorrect to say "PC > Some Console" or "Some Console > PC" because there is no such thing as "the PC".  PCs come in a wide spectrum of price, configuration, and age.  Also adoption of gaming PCs that are competitive with current consoles is relatively low.

E.g. when someone comes and says "PC could do those console graphics 5 years ago" well yes [some PC] which was likely expensive, had the same GFLOPs or more as a console today, but the average or even 99% percentile PC could not.  Also certainly there were no GPUs with 8GB of addressable GDDR5, or DirectX 11+ capabilities that far ago.

Even now in 2014 only PCs in the 90% percentile have DirectX 11 capable GPUs (http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/) and within those, there is a wide spectrum of performance from GPUs that are 10 times slower than PS4 has, up to GPUs that are over double what PS4 has.

Having said that I don't want to take away the fact that a PC will make the ultimate gaming machine if you are prepared to spend on it.

That's partly to do with the fact that Linux has OpenGL for accelerated 3D graphics, and OpenGL has lagged behind D3D in features.

The Xbox One or PS4 would be easier to emulate today on a Windows 64bit PC with a Mantle driver.  The CPUs should be easy, and the GPUs are close to standard AMD GPUs.

The (very) hard parts to emulate would be the unified memory.  Current PCs that have separate main and GPU memory would be limited by PCIe bandwidth 31GB/s, and APUs that have unified memory don't have sufficient RAM bandwidth for now.

Consoles also do less at any one time.

1 Teraflop of power on a console is exactly the same as 1 Teraflop of power on a PC, anyone who deals with a ton of compute understands that.

Using "Flops" is a pathetic use of measurement to gauge performance anyway.
I have over 20 Teraflops of "Power" in my PC, which outside of floating point operations, means literally nothing.

You do have Windows Games on Linux.

WINE allows you to run windows games, you can also virtualise Windows to run games in Linux.
And then there are games with specific releases just for Linux.

I still don't have "8Gb" of total addressable GDDR5 in my PC for games. - Only 4Gb. (16Gb total for compute or non-combined tasks.)
Yet, I still have over 10x the GPU performance of the PS4.

Remember, Ram doesn't actually do any processing, it cannot accellerate anything or make anything "run faster". - It's there so that in essence things don't slow-down due to data not being able to be accessed fast enough.

Aye, tflops isn't everything as the 970 shows. 

But when you look at cards of equal price range to the consoles, or factor in the cost of console vs Pcs (ergo a slightly beefier gpu), the gpus still outstrip the consoles. A 280 or 760 easily can play games at 1080p on high/ultra and only cost £150. Within a few months they will be even cheaper....yet the consoles can't.

Sure, consoles in the short term might be a bit cheaper, but they have to last you how many years? Then when you factor in the cost of running one, a PC is by far a better choice (cheaper, can do more, far more power etc). Besides casual and social gaming, there is no reason to buy consoles anymore.

Hmm, so what do you have 4 GTX Titan SLI?

If yes then it seems about as relevant as comparing your single PC to a compute cluster and laughing at how poor single PCs are.

Full system cost: GTX 760 $210, Core i5 $200, 12GB RAM $120, cheapish motherboard $60, basic Blu-ray drive $60, basic gaming case $50, basic PSU $50, 500GB hard disk $50, Windows 8.1 $120, gaming mouse & keyboard $100+, and optionally wireless game controller $50.  Probably should invest in some AntiVirus as well.

That's $1070+ for an OK gaming setup.  If you start thinking about overclocking then you also have to spend more on parts.

I have a gaming PC - I spend $500 to $1000 upgrading or fixing my PC every other year.

Your PC also doesn't get any better over the years unless you buy more upgrades.

And sure, a PC can do more but there are many options for that.  A gaming PC generally means big, noisy, not portable.  So if you want to "do more" you might choose a laptop that is not good for gaming, but is light and portable.

I would liken your above argument to saying that a pick up truck is the only kind of vehicle you need.  A pick up truck is cheaper, can carry a lot more, more power, etc. so there is no reason to buy anything but pick up trucks anymore .

Personally, I use different gadgets for different needs.

Want to play PC games on Ultra?  Get Windows PC with awesome CPU & GPU.
Want to compile shit loads of code fast?  Get a Linux PC with lots of RAM and CPU cores.
Want something for day-to-day that just works stably?  Get a MacBook.
Want to game on your big livingroom TV and A/V system, should be quiet, and work with your Harmony remote?  Get a console!

Iv been a gamer since the Atari 2600, and iv owned all consoles and PCs. I must say PC is the way to go if you want to take your gaming to another level. For starters theres a bigger community on PC, the Services are Free, the game library is bigger, you can play all your old games, the games are cheaper, only have to buy the game once for the ultimate version and you have all variety of genres like RTS and Simulators ontop of PCs own exclusives like Star Citizen, DOTA 2 and WoW. If it wasnt for Halo I wouldnt own a next gen console. Consoles are basic PCs now with the heavy porting of Indies etc.

These arent opinions but actrual facts.

Consoles are great for there own exclusives aswell but with the paywalls and DRM, its turning into a book library were you basically rent out games and dont even own them anymore.

Buying a Gaming Rig is like buying a good sound system, the better the quality the more you pay. You will make it all back on cheaper game prices and no Paywalls.

Owning all is the best way to go.

This is facts.

Owning all means you don't miss out on any games. Don't holdout, and don't settle for anything less. This is what it means to be a glorious god gamer.

I wouldn't be caught dead using nVidia.

But you are right.

However, my point was, you don't need "8Gb" of GDDR5 to match or exceed the PS4's performance.

Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.

Lets take my main PC as an example shall we? When I first built it, the motherboards BIOS/UEFI was still pretty "fresh", over the years and thanks to the tweaks Asus has performed at the BIOS/UEFI level my overclocking headroom increased from 4.6ghz to 5ghz on my 3930K.

PC's also constantly get driver updates that increases performance.

You also get Game, OS and API updates which also improves performance and in some cases, graphics (Aka. Half Life).

Older games also get released with "mods" which can drastically improve the graphics of a game, shall I provide some examples? Some of them can compete with the latest and prettiest of games.
You also can get mods that do the reverse of improving graphics, thus reducing the graphics below what the game was designed for in order to run on antiquated hardware. (I.E. "Oldblivion" which allows you to run Oblivion on Origional Xbox class PC hardware.) or Shadershock for Bioshock.

To say that the PC doesn't get any better with time, has NEVER been true.

When it comes to the PC, you can't *really* stereotype it.
You wan't something that's small, silent and portable in the PC space (Aka. Console Dimensions?) Then ITX is the way to go.

Asrock even did a prebuilt with a quad-core Haswell CPU with enough room to drop an nVidia Titan inside of it.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7055/computex-2013-asrocks-m8-miniitx-gaming-pc

Or hows about something a little more extreme? Water cooling in a prodigy case! Even has handles for the portability factor. (Something the Playstation and Xbox lack. :P)

Wait a min... are you trying to argue this point too? Do you just try and dispute and argue about everything?

Its a  FACT that consoles are more efficient than PCs. Thats simply what a console is all about. A console can do more with the hardware that it is. When it comes to doing what the console is designed to do. Which is play games. But somehow you want to even argue about that too? Of course the PC is doing more things at the same time, but thats because that is what its designed to do. A console is stripped of all those "extra things" just for the sole purpose of being efficient.

Its like both a formula 1 car and a mercedes S class AMG has 800BHP. With that same 800BHP the F1 car will beat the benz in performance every single time. Hoever, th benz actually has doors, climate control, a roof, a usb charger, seat warmers...etc. The benz is doing more, but for the sole purpose f racing (which is what the F1 car is made for and the benz can "also" do) the F1 car is going to be faster and do more in regards to racing with its 800BHP.

I don't even believe that I we ar talking about this too lol. Ah well..