Again, this is even less true today. With how developed game-engines are, as well as consoles finally using X86 we aren't going to see huge performance gains. In fact, we've been seeing the opposite. Image-quality and frame-rates have been decreasing with every new game. Just look at Final Fantasy XV for example. According to your hypothesis, FInal Fantasy XV should look how it does (in terms of graphical fidelity) and still maintain the 1080p 30fps resolutions that early games entailed. On PS4 it is struggling to maintain a variable resolution which averages at 900p at 20 fps. 

The Pentium was limited by the number of threads it had. If the games were developed with two threads in mind, it wouldn't be a problem. Furthermore, the PS4/XBO's Jaguar is many times less powerful than an i3. No amount of optimization will bridge that gap (if the game is CPU- bound, which is rare these days.) I can't see the cpu bottleneck being solved without new hardware or new game engines that take better advantage of multiple cores/threads. 

" retired BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk"

Its real, reinforced by the fact that no one currently active in the industry is willing to speak on it. 

adapt or fall behind

True, the i3 is much more powerful. But it has only up to 4 threads, a game optimized to make full use of 8 threads could still run better on the jaguar. But the point was that the GPU has to help the CPU, thus using some of it's power to do something other than graphics, which is unefficient at best. If the GPU wouldn't need to do that anymore for one reason or another, the i3/750Ti combination might fall back again, this time due the GPU being to weak compared to the one in the PS4.

But as you pointed out, this is hypothetical, it doesn't have to be true this gen. Especially not with DX12 and Vulkan, giving PC also a low level API and freeing up the overhead

How original. If you're going to condescend do it decently at least. Look at all those casual console gamers that TOTALLY dove into steambox, right? PC Gamers are a different crowd of gamer, the hefty majority of the market wants a plug and play experience, not something where they have to worry about having the right specs or a specific subconsole. 

I don't think it's as much a problem as he makes out. Devs obviously still need to aim for the lowest spec version because of the install base.
You can just target a game at 720p and 30fps on the PS4 and then crank that up to 1080p and 60fps with the PS4.5, or some equivalent upgrade. That can be done with almost no extra resources or planning.

Yeah there are quite a few obstacles when it comes to multithreading large-scale and diverse applications with many data types (like video games.) Multiprocessing/multithreading can be quite tricky, and thus far most games tend to just assign single-threaded workloads  that have separate data to a particular thread/core (audio is done on this core/thread, AI on this one, Physics on this one, etc, etc.) The issue is that certain algorithms benefit a lot from multi-processing, but because of things like deadlock it is a lot harder for programmers to do than what they've been doing in the past. Because games use so many different tools and algorithms, it would take a lot of dedication to figure out which ones should use a multi-threaded solution and which shouldn't. Not to mention that C++ isn't the easiest language to do concurrency in (the logic is quite obtuse and it can be a struggle), and most games are developed using C++ because it is so much faster than other high-level languages. 

There is also the issue that a lot of the functions of video games just don't benefit from multi-threading. Many things are just serial by nature and can't really be parallelized. 

An additional constraint is that developers don't want to lock out four-threaded CPU's (like i3's/i5's) because they are the most common in PC gaming, and PC gaming does net a lot of revenue.  

I think the issue is that console gamers want their cake and to eat it too. They want simplicity, but then they want everything specifically how they like it, and a plethora of features on top of that. Console manufacturers are trying to reconcile this trade-off (and have been doing so since the 7th generation with different SKU's), and in their eyes they see trading simplicity (for developers) in place of specialization (for consumers) as a solution. Since consoles still have the advantage of simplicity (in this scenario) over PC's and since the constraint is placed on developers, they don't risk any loss of consumers.

The developers that are affected the most are in-house developers who produce exclusives, and I think Microsoft and Sony think they can manage this well.

I7 4700MQ, 4 cores, 8 threads, 2.4ghz, 3.4ghz turbo (don't think that's enabled on my laptop)
16 GB RAM
Intel HD Graphics 4600
NVidea GForce GT 740M (384 CUDA cores at 980Mhz 2GB dedicated DDR3 at 1800 Mhz 14.4 GB/s)

Elite Dangerous is made to offload the CPU by using the GPU which works to my Laptop's disdavantage, leaving the CPU usage below 20% and for example loading of the system map or galaxy map depends on current fps which makes no sense at all. Enabling v-sync makes loading take longer, while that should leave more time available! And ofcourse it won't enlist help of the 2nd GPU either.

Most games atm are made with the assumption that there is a powerful GPU and 2 fast CPU cores, ignoring the rest.
However my laptop would probably overheat if something would use it close to 100% of its actual capabilities, efficient cooling is an afterthought in these things. I notice the frame rate getting worse as the GPU heats up and sound starts stuttering after a while.

Consoles really aren't that bad value! Less than half of the price, 3 times the GPU power, bought around the same time.

It might hypothetically be that simple in your mind, but in reality it isn't. It's tons of additional work for developers to modify their engines and optimize their games for different specs when there is absolutely zero reason to think that additional work will increase profits. It's a waste of time and money for a development perspective. That's what this man is saying. This is what I have been saying based on my own experience making console video games.

And people here still think "it can be that simple". No it can't. Not without a significant amount of work that no one wants to pay for.