Almost all components will continue to be produced if they're popular enough to justify the cost to manufacture them ... As an example the motorola 68000 processor is still in production after 30 years on the market, and is heavily used in embedded systems.

Now, as soon as a console is released all manufacuturers R&D tends to be split into two distinct groups, a group that continues to work on the existing console (creating revisions and looking to reduce the cost) and another group that works on the follow up system (initially just looking into the direction of their next platform); at some point in time a company has to decide that they're going to release the follow up system and then the R&D will become more centered around the upcomming console.

@Ail: There wasn't hot air. Now, the problem with the tech is, that it tends to outdate in a year after its release. What the engineers aim, is as high tech as possible as affordable price as possible at the moment of its initial release. After the outdating, it's only a matter of software optimization, how outdated it will look.
All the chipset are at least customized, so basically they are in production only because of the specific hardware (although, you do want to use as standard parts as possible to cut down the price). The only way to have a "ten year hardware" is to have updateable hardware, which so far have been seen only in PC (and even this isn't 1:1 compatible, since you can't run 586 code in 386 HW, even if the performance would be similar).
The thing is, that engineers can't make hardware ten years in advance (financial people theoretically could), what they can do is create a principle that is used still after ten years, but the hardware itself isn't.

Whoever banned LeetGeek all I can say is Thank you, he has constantly been the most annoying person on this site, I havent seen 1 post from him that wasent full of fanboyisum and hate.

On topic this is excatly the type of coverage Nintendo wanted from E3 so I guess they won in there eyes.

well sony is close to get the 10 years on the ps2.
they may be able to do the same with ps3, who knows.

btw: i think what leekgeek mean even if was a flamebait was the wii is a redesigned gamecube+wiimote

and pretty much it is, since you wii didn't need a second cpu to play gamecube games.

its the same kind of cpu just clocked a bit more.

Game_boy, ever intelligent as usual