My PC has gone through three GPUs in the period that I've owned my 360. Each of those GPUs cost more than the 360...now add the cost of the rest of the PC.
The PC-master-race notion of upgradability is utterly detached from the mainstream gaming public who have neither the interest, patience or financial ability to run that gauntlet.
It's about the console I buy today having a comparable shelf-life to one purchased 5 or even 7 years ago. When the 360 in my home office died late last year, I was faced with paying essentially as much as I spent in 2008 to get a new one, but knowing it would be end-of-lifed and all-but-unsupported in a year.
To say nothing of the odd situation where that same 360, purchased in 2008, was no better than the 360 I bought for my living room in 2006 (insert RRoD joke here).
Yet the Roku I bought last year for my folks was better than the one I bought in 2009. And the AppleTV I bought last year was better than the one I bought a year before.
The public is never going to swap a GPU. But they certainly understand the difference between a $300 purchase that lasts 5 years and one that lasts 2. And a $300 purchase this year that confers an improved product over what one could buy for $300 five years ago.
The PC-master-race notion of upgradability is utterly detached from the mainstream gaming public who have neither the interest, patience or financial ability to run that gauntlet.