There are a couple of entrants to the console wars this gen

The Pandora by OpenPandora
the GP2XWiz by Gamepark Holdings
and the Zeebo by Tectoy

Well Tiger entered into the handheld race and look what happened ;)

In order to enter the business and suceed the company has to give the gamer an incentive to buy their product and that would be games. And in order to get third party devs the incentive to develop a game for you you would need a gamer to buy your product. So basically you need a first party developing for you before you enter. or else your dead. and starting up a big enough first party seems hard and buying studios would be costly.

Any new launches of a console wouldn't happen before the beginning of 2010, otherwise you'd hear those new companies announce their products. By then, it would be the next gen.

Well never count out EA.

 EA would lose the NFL's stamp of approval if they tried to make Madden exclusive. That wouldn't be too good.

I'm surprised Samsung hasn't released a console yet. That could be very good.

How you dare ? Mattel rejoined the industry this gen with the hyperscan (j/k )

you would need to have serious amount of moneys if you wanted to try and relinquish fanboys away from thier dearly beloved consoles.i know i for one would not flock to a new console next gen. as a business paln it doesnt semm to make sense to try and take on 3 huge mulitinational corperations.

It seems like we've got our big juggernauts that will just sort of always be here.

Movies have Disney, Universal, and MGM

Cars have Honda and Ford

Games have Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony