Consoles: "days are numbered," says PC developer I've not heard of. But does he have a point?

As news stories go, it's a bit of a punt. Online gaming site, Jolt, attending some kind of launch event for Hewlett Packard's new range of PCs, heard the founder of developer, Trion World Network, proclaiming "I believe the days of the console are numbered".
Later, some chap from NVIDIA added, "Our advantage as developers is we know what is coming. And what is coming is far ahead of the console. You will see a huge difference between what you can get on a PC and a console." We presume he's talking about the forthcoming 8800 Ultra graphics card due in a couple of weeks.
On one hand, this is a load of hot air. High-end PCs have regularly out-performed consoles through the last twenty years, but this hasn't stopped dedicated games machines from dominating the leisure software market - due to the fact that, historically, they're comparatively cheap; they provide a closed, stable and uncomplicated platform that doesn't need upgrading every six months and when you buy a game you get the finished article, not something that gets patched the second it's released and dozens more times thereafter.
But actually, with the latest generation, consoles are in danger of edging into the seamier territory of PC ownership.
There's price for a start. PS3 is £425, while Xbox 360 retails at around £270, but if you want a HD DVD drive and a couple of years of online gaming subscriptions you're looking at around £200 more. Plus, after barely a year on sale, a new version of the machine is now available - Xbox 360 Elite - offering combined functionality, and an unappetizing new PC-style sales model.
Thing is, consoles now want to occupy the same space as the family PC. They download and play music and movies, they do web-surfing and online chat, they even have interchangeable operating systems (well, PS3 does). So in a bizarre way, they're actually dissolving their own USPs by becoming more multi-functional. As they get closer to PC functionality it gets harder and harder to distinguish them from the good old desktop workhorse.
Meanwhile, PCs are coming in the opposite direction. Most manufacturers now have their 'living room' Media Center PC brands - like Packard Bell's SmartTV - and are eager for us to throw out our old TVs, bring in the computer from the study and use it to watch and record TV while streaming internet radio and checking out our MySpace pages. Of course, they've been trying this for ages, but now they've got the specs and flashy OS to capture mainstream consumer imagination, plus Web 2.0 has made broadband internet an acceptable family entertainment solution.
Of course, consoles are still cheaper than high-end PCs, and anything you can do on a PC you can do a lot easier on a dedicated games machine. Online gaming is still relatively complex on PC - often you have to find your own servers via a third-party like AllSeeingEye and if you want to talk to other players it's usually much better to go for a solution like TeamSpeak than to rely on whatever the developer has provided. None of this is the case with Xbox Live.
Yet bad habits are slipping in. Regular firmware updates add functionality, sure, but some will find the prompts confusing. Also game patches are an unwelcome consequence of consoles going online and providing developers with a second, third or fourth chance to get their game code right. You could argue that if a developer finds a new way to get their multiplayer code running quicker then it's a good idea to send it out as a post-release extra, but it's a slippery slope - toward the point where you expect a game to have a new patch everytime you load it up.
Maybe that's what the founder of Trion World Network meant when he said about the days of the console being numbered - it wasn't a jingoistic, pro-PC rant, it was an acknowledgement that consoles are turning into PCs, bad habits and all. Or vice versa, of course.
Just what are we supposed to put beneath our TVs these days?