The same could be said but in reference to the Sega Saturn architecture for its time and talent surrounding it. Regardless of the technical potential of a system if there isn't a strong revenue incentive the corporate moneyhats will put their most talented on the most financially viable platform. Thats even more true now then it ever has been due to the rising dev costs. I can't predict the future of the console war but talent usually follows the money. The xbox1 had amazing potential with it's time with a more powerful GPU, larger Ram, and included HD but 90% of its games were near identical to their ps2 version.
SEGA didn't have the internal studio operation that Sony did, however, and Sony actively funds many projects that other companies consider quirky or risky; devs who want to follow a 'dream' with their creation benefit in that regard if they secure Sony as their publisher. Their entire EDI setup right now is devoted to encouraging such in fact, with only original IPs receiving funding from Sony themselves. Further though, I wasn't speakign to dev
houses being drawn towards Cell, but rather the individual programmer. During Saturn's day when J-devs ruled supreme, J-culture also was in effect. Great gaming culture, but the work culture reflected the lifetime employment paradigm of the day, and if your company was not doing Saturn, then neither were you. But in the more Western-centric model at play now, and with a lot of console talent now in Western countries, you'll see devs leave their present job to go work somewhere else - be it for money, location, or... yes, some will do it for the architecture/programming.
Let's take Heavenly Sword as an example: Sony funded it when no one else would, and Marco went to join the Ninja Theory team to work on PS3 (he was working on a multiplatformer in Italy at the time). So here we see one real-world example - and very tangible on B3D in particular due to Ninja Theory's presence here - of not only a title many are looking forward to, but certainly a capable developer as well coming over to Sony due a) to a risk-taking culture, and b) an architecture that some devs indeed do find 'exciting.'
The LionHead splinter faction that joined up with Sony and became MediaMolecule (of LittleBigPlanet fame) is of course another example of concentrated talent seeking 'liberal' project constraints.
XBox is a system where that 10% of games that
weren't identical came later in its life, as the general excitement around the console grew. Halo 2 I'll mark without hesitation as a turning point across both consumer and developer opinion of the console. And if XBox had lasted longer, you would see that the trends of early XBox life would have naturally started to undo themselves anyway; but the box was killed early to ride that wave into the 360 launch, and I think that makes sense. But I *do* think there is a marked difference between the XBox 'atmosphere' pre and post Halo 2.