I think Apple have a home console in the "works" its an Apple TV with Rogue, paired to an Apple A7 driven Ipad4, and iPhone/iPod touch family - oh hang on before i get my coat, this is kind of already happening in the iOS5 Airplay mirroring arena!
Airplay as in rendering on the handheld and streaming to the TV/Display? The latency is too high today, but the upcoming (and very little talked about!) Wi-Fi Display standard will fix that (as much as it can be fixed). And compression quality should be decent-ish with 15-20Mbps H.264 High Profile on a PowerVR VXE. Tablets are moving from 20MHz single antenna to 40MHz MIMO Wi-Fi, so with 4x the wireless throughput (72->300Mbps unrealistic peak) you could easily do Blu-ray or better quality wireless streaming, which is pretty nice. And infinitely nicer in every damn than OnLive.
But seriously, using a battery powered device for 3D rendering on a wired device at that level of performance is a bit insane. Unless you mean using the iPhone/iPad as a controller with basic graphics ala Wii U's controller? That does make slightly more sense although the lack of haptic feedback might be a problem.
More to the point, the technical synergies for Apple TV and home consoles are perfect except for one big problem: the complete and utter lack of storage space. And if you don't want retail distribution, you're going to need a lot of it (Wi-Fi streaming textures from a Mac/PC is unthinkable). So you need a HDD which is going to significantly increase costs. On the plus side, it can also be useful on the TV side of things (no matter what Apple says).
You know what would really blow my mind in a good way? A $299 three-way between a home console, Apple TV, and Time Capsule. The only problem is that it means you need a wired cable from your internet socket to your living room unless you don't use it as a base station and have a separate Wi-Fi router. Still, I don't see how Apple could justify a price point above $199 otherwise, which is pretty tight with a HDD. Or maybe they don't give a shit and it'll be 64x64 2-bit textures for everybody, or maybe it just won't happen.
