I think it's a mistake to call for a single standard in gaming. This worked for DVD and audio cds for so long only because these media were both cheap and large. There was no better medium for a low-res home movie than a DVD - they're dirt cheap. At the same time, you can fit three or more hours of standard definition video on one, so they're perfectly good for film-length products. You bring up the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war, and this is a perfect example of a standard falling apart. As soon as a market appeared for movies that couldn't fit on a normal DVD, new media emerged.
For people who just want to play Nintendogs, Wii Sports, and similar titles, advanced hardware is worthless. These titles can reach a broader audience by being compatible with less powerful systems. Dictating a standard that is significantly more powerful than these require means that many people won't buy these games. However, big budget titles like Halo 3 and MGS4 appeal to an audience that demands features that require more powerful hardware to implement. Making them use the same minimum standard required for games like Wii Sports would cause demand for these titles to drop.
In short, movies used to be fine with the DVD standard because it was the ideal format for everyone who wanted to watch a movie. Unless a single console is the ideal hardware package for everyone who wants to play games, a single console industry is not good for the consumer. It's important to realize that DVD wasn't a standard by fiat; it was a standard because it was stupid to release a movie on anything else. We can't have a natural console standard until and unless it's just stupid to release a new console which differs from the existing one in significant ways. Perhaps one could argue that we're pretty much there right now, given that Nintendo is the only one making money, but one expects that something like the 360 or PS3 could have been profitable had its parent company not been so busy selling at a loss.
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