:)

I am guessing that you have a very different idea of what is acceptable when it comes to gaming hardware. The cost effectiveness of a console is pretty hard to beat. I only need to buy a new console about every 8 years or so to run the latest games, which kills the update cycle on PC hardware. I used to buy a new $150 video card every 18 months just hoping to be able to run the current games, that is $1200 over 8 years, just for the video cards.
I can't run anything using the Crytek engine on my current laptop, which was $1000 just last fall. Mass Effect looks comical on it, running at 10-12 fps. But Mass Effect on the 360 is fine, and FarCry 2 on the PS3 looks great. I can't imaging running the new "Prince of Persia" or "Assassin's Creed" on the $500 pc and being happy with the video performance. They run flawlessly on a PS3 or an X360.
For those that think the PS3 is just a sub $50 video card, you really need to study some computer architecture. It may only have a cheap video card, but it has an array of cell processors to function as the GPUs and it has a bus speed about 10x faster than any PC I have ever heard of.
.... All of that said, I would still rather game on a PC most of the time. Historically, most of the really good games were developed for PC.

I literally spent less than $500 on my tower (if you don't count the things I added on for non-gaming purposes), and can play Farcry 2 and Crysis (and everything else I own on Steam http://steamcommunity.com/id/weclock/games ) You're doing it wrong. It's an intel Quadcore 2.4ghz, with 3gigs of ram, windows vista shipped with it (but I put XP on it), 500gb hdd (I added a 2nd one), and with my own video card I slapped in it, it came out to $480. :D
So it is entirely possible, because I've DONE it.

On the other hand, if you buy a PC game where the framerate drops and the game goes choppy whenever a lot of enemies is on the screen, you can upgrade your PC and have it run flawlessly. If you buy a console game where the same thing happens (not an uncommon occurrence these days, I'm told), what can you do about it? Wait for the next generation console and hope that it's backwards compatible?

Same here. Its gotten so cheap. You can get a great new video card for $100-150, decent CPU (all you need for gaming, really) for $50-80, some good RAM for $30...good to go, and for quite a long time.

I really don't understand why do you compare PC and consoles hardware, and price of this hardware. It's really not the point.
On an hand, you have computers with many many different configurations. Games made for computers must "accept" multiple configurations/hardware, and must also be playable on not so recent computers.
On the other hand, you have three consoles. Let's take the example of a game being released only on one of these three: you have one configuration. The game can be developped to run at maximum performance authorized by this configuration. It's definitely not the same as on PCs.
I mean, I've seen games on consoles which could never never look so nice on PC, just because it was exploiting the maximum performances of the console on which it is released.
With that in mind, and also the fact that a console doesn't need to run simultanously a heavy operating system with a lot of background tasks, comparing PC and console hardware doesn't mean anything...

I used to switch between the consoles and the PC, but money is a lot tighter than it used to be, so my consoles have recently either been sold or confined to the loft.
I am now a dedicated PC gamer and to be honest i'm not really missing the console scene at all. The PC has got such a rich catalogue of games and GOG has brought some great examples I've never even heard of to my attention. In many ways my gaming habit has recieved a new lease of life because of this; the only thing I really miss is Rez HD on the 360, still get the odd craving for that one.

To be fair they are different experiences. Each with their own pro's and con's. I like both and I'llplay both when I feel like it. I will by console games that are on sale and pc games on sale too.

LINK NAO

I used to play on consoles and pc since I remember. Never chose between either or just cause at any given point in time I did have some kind of console beside my desk hooked up to the tv. Just in the last couple of years I stopped playing on pc and carried on with consoles. Why? I don't really know, maybe just I'm a convenient twait but nowadays PC serves me two purposes: coding and playing old games once in a blue moon. Don't think I'll ever come back to serious pc gaming.

Yeah, b/c for some foolish reason, consoles don't support KB/mouse on their games.
That's the best method to play those kind of games, if you ask me.

these days, owning a pc is pretty much a necessity anyway, so you have to subtract a couple of hundred dollars from the price of a gaming when comparing its price to consoles, as the only thing you are paying for related to gaming are the upgraded components that you needed to play the games, capiche? everyone is going to buy a computer anyway, and that's going to cost $300 or more, but if you want to game you're going to have to add another $200 or so, which is what i would call the cost of a gaming pc.
by the way, my computer cost me $440 and I got it during the last generation of consoles. i still play brand new games on it at high settings after only $100 dollars of upgrades in like five years.

I still use my trusty home-built system from 2006, which was top of the line then and still holds its own now. I'm not sure if I've already said it before, but the joys about PC gaming is that you don't have to upgrade your system every week if you don't want to, contrary to console gamer belief. My 8800 GTX, 4 gigs of RAM, and a dual core Core 2 Extreme processor still gets the job done quite nicely, and I can run Crysis at a decent frame rate with everything set to medium/high.
And owning a PC is like owning a Lambo, because you get great stuff and you get to feel special that you've tinkered with your system, made regedit changes, and basically made the computer feel more personal. Consoles are like the old fart of a Honda, cheap and lifeless, yet still does what you want.

dell was having a one time sale on a quad core system for $400 (litterally $100 a core, the rest was free).