It wasn't about consoles but gaming in general. Programming Games for DOS required a lot of assembly knowledge (at least, if you wanted something fluid) and deviation from industry norms only increased development cost (thinking things like High res support necessitating VESA code, to say nothing of sound support in DOS.)
Devs hated dealing with all this extra work, extra compatibility, extra libraries (old gamers may recall MILES or DMX setup screens in some titles.) The libraries for Windows 3.1 were... not at all up to the task.
Thus, DirectX was created. Not so much to create a console competitor, as to show PCs as superior to consoles overall.
Which, when one thinks about it, may explain why Eric/etc were not big fans of the XBox; in some ways it conceded defeat on a level.