I'm pretty sure the Gamecube did some things better than the Xbox. Can't remember now exactly which ones they were though. Maybe someone with more knowledge about that will chime in. 

But yeah, is most cases, the Xbox came out on top.

I'm well aware of where the Gamecube could excel.

But at the end of the day, it's about the games and Xbox had the best looking games.

For the most part. I would say Metroid Prime stood up well, though. A lot of it depended on whether you were on an HDTV and using component cables etc. If you were running everything with composite and on an SDTV, things tended blurred and the differences were pretty small. The PS2, on the other hand, now that was the real stinker. It had the best library of exclusives by a mile, but its games looked so much worse in comparison that whenever there was that rare chance to get a third party game on Gamecube or Xbox, I would always get it for one of those instead. Splinter Cell 1, being a prime offender.

Nah. Even at 480P when you fired up something like Morrowind and saw that Pixel Shader 1.4 effects, you knew you were playing something that couldn't be done on another console.

Remember, we didn't achieve "Photorealism" even at 480P, so there can be a big gulf in visuals.

My experiences and yours were completely different. I had a brand new 32inch, 1080i CRT during that gen with all three consoles hooked up to it with component cables. I do not recall any Xbox game being that far ahead graphically to the best stuff on Gamecube. Yes, they were better--especially in the lighting department--but not mind-blowing better. Not in my opinion anyway. And I was playing everything at its highest possible resolution and in progressive scan (when it was applicable). 

Man, this whole discussion is giving me flash backs to the old days when message boards were the go-to for console combat. Looking back now, it's kind of crazy how rabid people use to get over things of this nature. In a way, it kind of foreshadowed the vitriol that we now see on social media etc. 

Yeah my experience is similar to this, while Xbox had the technological edge over the Gamecube in most respects, I feel the best looking games on GCN like RE4, Rogue Squadron 2 & 3, Starfox Adventures, etc could stand their ground against anything on Xbox in terms of overall looks. The TEV may not have been as flexible as Xbox's programmable pixel and vertex shaders but it could still spit out a ton of nice looking effects while maintaining a good framerate, 60fps in the case of Rogue or Starfox. GC was no slouch in crunching tons of polygons either.

Yeah, I remember playing Metroid Prime in progressive scan mode and being blown away. I still think that game was the best looking game of that gen. Maybe not technically the most superior, but the art style was just a notch ahead of everything else imo.

There is no way Gamecube was more powerful than the xbox. You are the first person I ever heard make such a claim. Gamecube games did not look as good as xbox.

While I’d also say XBox was that gen’s most powerful system, I agree the difference to GameCube wasn’t that big. They were closer than 3DS and Vita. However it is true that we are often fooled by Nintendo’s stellar art department that is capable of making truly fantasical things at times, and the fact that Factor5 (Rogue Squadron) were wizards at getting the best out of hardware. In any case, XBox and GameCube were clearly in their own league way above that of the PS2 and Dreamcast.

The thing is that Nintendo would've come up with a slighlty more powerul console than the Wii U in any case, so making it also portable was the best choice they could have.