The transition to consoles "just" being locked-down PCs makes me a little sad. From a software engineering perspective I really like the idea of squeezing out raw performance from custom bare metal architectures.
Many consoles had quite a learning curve for developers. And you see some drastic improvement in quality between early titles in the console lifetime and the last major exclusives for them. (There are more than a few examples of poor quality ports from one platform to another though.)
Yeah, I think the learning curve and ability to optimize for the hardware is the draw.