Consoles may always be catching up to PCs, but you'll be paying roughly £800-£1000 for a hardcore PC, which would buy you a console, a pretty nice tv, and some games.
What is with this zombie dead horse?
Consoles do not warp the laws of economics. Console hardware as a rule will consistently be more expensive per performance metric then mainline computer hardware from a Bill of Materials standpoint. It's custom hardware and the extra R&D is not as spread out as it is in mainline computing. If a console manufacturer decides to sell a console at below the cost of the Bill of Materials, it is because they expect to make the difference up in extra royalties on games, which will be on top of the developer and publisher's cut.
Ergo the only way the sentiment that a console is more cost effective then mainline computer hardware, in serving the functions mainline computer hardware is well suited to handle is if it is a utter commercial failure and the company needs to kill the entire project in response. Ergo Nintendo making the point to have features and concepts divergent from normal computer capabilities at the time they're produced, and often manages to maintain this through an entire product cycle. Ergo it utterly dominates in sales versus set tops whose only stand out factor is the rare exclusive titles that tend to be FPSes that have to be played on a gamepad. Analog joysticks being something that's well known to be a good control if the object is to keep moving in complex ways, but being poorly suit to precise location adjustments which is a mouses area of strength.
The cheapest LED LCD HDTV on Newegg from a reputable brand is a
19" 1333x768 200USD model from Toshiba. A solid
Viewsonic 21.5" 1920x1080 LED LCD monitor is around 160USD, and it's
TV equivalent is 250USD. The lack of a tuner and other factors insure this secondary hardware is cheaper as a rule.
Consoles have a lot of good attributes, but being power competitive or a more economical system is not one of them. Nor is a non-existent guarantee things will actually "just work." Nor is gamepads at all relevant to a discussion between PC and consoles unless the console controller actually has something that the diverse field of PC gamepads doesn't offer. Of the current offerings the Wii is very strong in this respect, its competition is not.
