The way I see it, you pay £300 for a console and it will play every game, barring add-ons, released for it and those games will improve graphically over the life of the console as developers get used to working on it.
With PC gaming, you spend, say, £600 for a computer that will play games at a certain spec and as graphics improve, you'll have to play them on proportionately inferior settings, before eventually upgrading.
Then the PC will crash.
Seriously, my laptop cost me £1400 last year and I wouldn't play anything more than an MMO on it.
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Still the number one reason for the success of the Internet.