The best consoles. You could disagree, but you would be wrong.
NES vs Master system
SNES vs Mega Drive
N64 vs Dreamcast vs PS1
Xbox vs PS2
Xbox 360 vs PS3 vs Wii
New Xbox vs PS4 vs Wii U - too early to say.
I think the generations are all roughly right.
I think they will all go the way of the media centre - proper gamers have PCs. Console gamers are on average more casual - marketing a console to pure gamers would be suicide - how many people bought a PS3 because it was a cheap Blu Ray player and treated the games as an extra? A fair few I would imagine.
Noone want to change their console every year to be able to play the latest game on ultra settings - if they did, they should have bought a pc.
Personally, I would prefer a box that only played games, but that isn't what a console is anymore - Sony and Microsoft know this - for pure gaming a console will never, ever match PC gaming - they need the people with the netflix subscription who don't care about comparing framerates to buy their consoles to buy them.