And let's not pretend you don't have a PC, or that buying a PS4 means you won't buy a PC too. Everybody has a PC - because they're not just gaming systems. They're multipurpose wonderboxes that also get you entertainment, communicate globally, are practically required for any form of work that isn't hourly manual labor, and on and on and on. A good gaming PC might cost you $900, but even if you have a PS4, you have at least a $600 PC too just for the other stuff. You didn't save $600 by buying a $300 PS4, you spent $300 on a PS4 instead of $200 on a graphics card.
Speaking of this, it always used to bug me how the cost comparison between PC and console
never includes the cost of a television for a console. I get that for some people a TV is a given, but it sure wasn't for me for many years. For nearly a decade my PC monitor was as big as my hand-me-down television, and of much better quality. A good TV used to be a big cost, if you didn't just write it off as assumed. Granted, cheap televisions are a lot more capable than they used to be, but I still think it's a little unfair to count the
entire cost of a PC, when it's used for more than just gaming, but not count the TV / sound system in with the cost of console ownership.
$1,500 might get a mid-range rig, but you'll be hankering for an upgrade within 2 years when your video cards and processors are starting to get old.
That's complete bullshit. If you buy a $1,500 PC right now, assuming that it can run any cross-platform release now, it will still run all those cross-platform releases in two years. It probably will in 4 years. I might not at 1080p 60fps by that point, but guess what,
none of the consoles are running at that resolution and framerate. I built my current PC about 7 years ago, and it was barely mid-range when I built it. It took about 4 years before games came out that it couldn't play at all, though some console ports didn't run stellar, and I had to run some games at 1280x720, and turn down some options.
And bear in mind that the current generation of consoles isn't ahead of the PC curve like previous generations of consoles have been. Previous consoles used more specialized hardware. Current systems are much closer to PCs, so they don't have the benefits that came from requiring special programming. It's a lot easier to build a PC that can match the performance of the current generation of consoles.