As some people have pointed out, this isn't really true. It's a lot more complicated than that. But even assuming it were true, we don't have a large enough sample yet to point to any trends. We've really only got 4 examples to look at (5 if you consider this gen settled), and at numbers that small, any patterns can easily be chalked up to coincidence.

And that's exactly the explanation I would go with. The past competitions have been decided by many complicated factors entirely apart from the respective power of the consoles. For instance, Sony courted third parties better than Nintendo during the PS1 era, and it rode on the success of its brand to find victory with the PS2. The technical inferiority of those systems didn't have much to do with it.

There's one factor that goes along with the weaker systems that's not trivial, though: they launch earlier. Since price has never been particularly correlated with system power, I'd say that's the one significant force that gives weaker systems a (slight) edge.

intresting stuff, maybe its down to media coverage, i cant speak for before gen 5, but in gen 5 the PS1 got most coverage and won, in gen 6 PS2 got the most coverage and won, gen7, the Wii has more coverage and is winning, i believe they call it public awareness.

I love how everyone is trying to prove this as fact.

A console wins because of media, games, convenience, and price. The console with the worst technology only gets the price factor.

It is all a simple COINCIDENCE.

The least technical consoles are most of the time the consoles for the 'casual' gamers. So families with little children, old people, etc. go buy it.

They also are most of the time the cheapest consoles, so some people will buy them faster.

GC was the cheapest last gen for the whole generation and more powerful than the PS2. So the price factor has nothing to do with it.

The SNES was more powerful than its competition. It was capable of more effects(mode 7 and blurring) more colors and more on screen sprites than the genesis it was also capable of more screens for parallax scrolling.

The Neo Geo was the most powerful for its time yet it flopped themain reason being price. 

Here is what I think happened. The PS2 launched before the remaining systems DC was already dead because of the Sny hype machine and emotion engine BS. When MS and GC released the price was not statistical different than the PS2 which had already established a few games that were released and had a bunch of games coming out for it. The PS2 won.

The PS1 had sony chasing after disaffected third party publishers with better contracts and cheaper publishing prices while also seizing upon larger memory size to easily incoporate voice and video into the games for extra cinamatic effects. More games came out for the PS1 early on and while Nintendo did well with the N64 with some of the best games of all time it wasn't an attractive platform for some of the smaller less well budgeted games which killed non first party variety. Factor in the price of games for cartridges and it stumbled. Saturn was too difficult ot program for it can hardly even be emulated today.

The Sega Genesis had a head start allowing it to build library and user base well before the SNES ever came out. Though many companies stuck with Nintendo because their was little advatnage in terms of contracts with third parties to go Sega. Then Sega killed tiself with addons with CDs and 32x leading t pack. Nintendo lasted longer even a few years into teh PS1/N64 era allowing it to win an essentially tied console war in which Sega started to do well in Europe.

The NES built a stranglehold because it was released in market that was afraid to sell video game systems(they introduced ROB to sell it as a toy in FAO schwartz). Retailers were afraid of the glut that caused the 83 crash and focused on Nintendo. Nintendo's draconian third party rules limited the amount fo bad games on the market while reassuring customers by advertising the seal of approval even above the system itself.

Atari had a lot of clones some with better graphics but since the games were so similiar most just stayed with the original.

The Wii's success so far is attributed to a sucker punch. A change of direction that makes it appear unique and inviting to people who only played games in the late 80's early 90's while also encouraging social games. It works well as a secondary console and its growing base will ensure more PS1 style games and less N64 style games aka shovelware with a few gems.  Allowing it to stand out on its own also prevents teh whole Atari clone syndrome of the early 80's. Game budgets are enough that notorioulsy bad cloning of games from the early 80's is also limited. though genre hogging is not.