I have to disagree completely with the illogical and baseless assumption people make concerning a comparison of consoles to PC's based on costs.
Over a year ago, a PC that can still play the best of games at higher resolutions with more game settings than even a current XBOX 360 can manage could be purchased for under $500 USD. We built several of these that included HD and SVideo output and wireless dual-analog gamepads running on our HDTV, XP Home, dx 9.0 videocards and have run 1080i widescreen resolutions for over a year. There is absolutely no need to upgrade these even today as modern games such as Oblivion and FEAR still play at >45-60fps with the wireless gamepad on the couch.
In our console room, we paid $199 for an XBOX, and now have to fork-out another $399 for a basic XBOX 360 in order to continue simply XBOX gaming. With the same investment, we're still very limited in number of game titles we can play, so a PS2 ($129), GameCube ($99) and a host of memory cards and wireless controllers for each ($250) are also required to even TOUCH the number of game titles released per month for the PC.
Overall, our "console" room has been a much, much more expensive investment and continues to be (Wii - $250? PS3 - $???) if we wish to game into 2006/2007. The HD-out PC requires $0 to continue playing all the current titles and future titles... and still has massive amounts of space for save-games, mp3 library space, enhancements, 3rd party mods, free add-ons, etc.etc.
I don't believe anyone should make false-basis of why "PC is superior to consoles" or "consoles are superior to PC's" as it's just broken logic. There is no real benefit to either and both provide compelling gaming experiences. To stand firm on one side or the other simply limits your experience and nothing else. Yes, they are both costly and involve investment... but if you wish to game on either platform, that investment is going to be about the same... unless you want to create misleading or apples vs. oranges gaming limitations in the comparison!
Cheers- and game on.