Not being biased(i have both but not 360 yet) My personal opinion is that The wii is cheaper to make games for than the PS3 with more of a profit margin so I would have to say Wii. Only problem is Nintendo needs to police 3rd party release so the games are not rushed out with poor quality, look at spiderman 3 for the wii. Heck ps1 could push those filthy graphics.

Not being biased(i have both but not 360 yet) My personal opinion is that The wii is cheaper to make games for than the PS3 with more of a profit margin so I would have to say Wii. Only problem is Nintendo needs to police 3rd party release so the games are not rushed out with poor quality, look at spiderman 3 for the wii. Heck ps1 could push those filthy graphics.

IMO your theory does hold water...but...and this is a big but!!!

Power of the system comes into it.

PS1, Nintendo 64 and Saturn were all of a similar power give or take a wee bit.

PS2, XBox, Dreamcast and Gamecube again were all of a similar power give or take a wee bit.

There is a much bigger gap between the Wii and the 360 and PS3.  This could make the difference....we don't know yet.....but at the moment, IMHO it's the cost and Wii remote factor that is making people buy the Wii...things will be different in the longer term IMHO.

I do think, that over the course it will be a close between the PS3 and Wii.....but I cannot see an out and out winner by a huge margin this time around. 

I'd say that's more of an observation than a theory.

If you were to come up with a series of performance benchmarks the difference between the Wii's performance and the PS3/XBox 360's performance would seem huge; in terms of what the performance difference actually means in real world terms I would say the difference between the N64 and Playstation was far greater.

In early 3D games having twice the processing power was huge because every decision you made was mostly determined by hardware limitations; the difference in what was possible on the Saturn/Playstation and the N64 had huge impacts on how games played. As technology improved the number of hardware limitations decreased and thus the impact extra processing power makes is much smaller. To illustrate this point consider the Difference between Doom II (released in 1994) and Half-Life (released in 1998) and compare it to the difference between Half-Life and Half-Life 2 (released 2004). I think that it is safe to say that the difference between Doom II and Half-Life is a much greater "real world" difference even though the processing power difference between what was possible between Half-Life and Half-Life 2 was far greater.

 All versions of Spiderman 3 were rushed and poorly done. The PS2 version got the shaft most of all. Spiderman 3 needed another 6 months of dev time on PS3, 360 and Wii. The PS2 version just needed to be scrapped and completely redone.

I agree to some respect.  The difference between say Wolfenstein and Doom was just out of this world and I can see where you're coming from.  But the Wii's power is much more similar to last generation than this.  And you can see the difference.  Look at Gears of War compared the last gen.  Although it's not completely noticeable at the moment because the world isn't HD compatible yet...but in a few years time when more and more people have access to HD TV's....you'll pretty easily notice the different between Wii's 480p and PS3's 1080p.

Resolution is a big deal and has been on the PC for years.  I remember playing Quake at 640x480...but you can now play games with much more detail and at a much higher resolution.....while in the console arena...we have been used to 480 for too long.  It's time to up the level a few notches. 

Well, I don't doubt there will be a huge difference in how realistic games will look on the Wii as compared to the PS3 and XBox 360; what I was specifically refering to was how the increased performance will impact gameplay. The reason I choose Doom II and Half Life was the difference in story telling and gameplay experience was drastic. Half-Life popularized the cinematic inspired FPS storytelling that is used in most games currently, and had a very large reasonably populated seemless world; Half Life 2 expanded upon these things but the improvement was mostly evolutionary.

Being that Half Life 2 and Doom 3 were easily ported to the XBox I see no reason to believe that similar games could not be produced for the Wii; I don't think that it is unreasonable to say that you're not going to see any revolutionary difference in gameplay between Half-Life 2 and what is available on the PS3/XBox 360.

Only thing about your post davygee is that I have a 10 year old dell monitor that can display essentially in 720p 1280 x 1024 highest resolution I also have a new LCD monitor that comes close to 1080p with 1680 x 1050 resolution but the thing is I know why these devices have higher resolutions than my 10 year old Panasonic television and that is how close I sit to them when playing games and just generally working. If I go up to my roomates 720p/1080i samsung television while we are watching something in 720p it is hard to see the individual pixels but they are visiable as I back away they become less and less noticiable this is why a television displaying 480p that is under lets say 30in really doesn't show that much more detail to the average viewer than a television displaying 720p at 30in assuming the same distance from the television. Now I'm not saying there is no difference between a program or game viewed at 720p/1080i just that the distance you sit from the television and the size of the television are the main contributing factors to that difference. As such I think another part of Nintendo's plan with the Wii was a calculated risk 480p viewed on a large television from a distance and on a small television up close is not going to make a huge difference to the average consumer as they will see little to no difference until they either close the distance or increase the size of the television. Higher resolution in monitors is the result of both of those happening I believe as you sit around 1-2 feet from your monitor as opposed to 5-6 I'd say for most televisions and monitors sizes increasing over time. Taking all that into account and the fact that Japan has one of the highest HD television concentrations in the world yet the Wii is outselling HD consoles in Japan 2:1 and you can kind of see why they would build a less expensive console at the cost of giving up 720p/1080p gaming. Anyways point is while I don't think we will be playing in 480p forever or anything like that I do believe that true HD concentration may take another 5 years to fully flourish and by that time based on Nintendo's record from the SNES to the Gamecube it is likely we will see a new console likely to display in 720p.