I actually disagree on this point. PCs are modular because they serve a wide variety of business cases, need to be bought in bulk in various configuration, need to provide for extremely low end users for certain important tasks (I think everyone has reacted to me mentioning email above, but this is kinda what I had in mind), and so on.
Yes of course the modularity serves a whole host of purposes, but that doesn't mean that one of those purposes it's gaming. Due to its modular nature you can indeed build a PC that's wholly unsuited for gaming. However you can also build a PC that's extremely well suited to gaming. Not merely because it has a big powerful GPU in there, but because it has a gaming orientated CPU, motherboard, SSD, memory etc.... Just because the system can be customised for one task, does not mean it's unsuited to another task when configured differently. That's the whole point of modular systems.
The premise of your argument seems to be that if it's not locked down to the single task of gaming, then it's not intended to be a gaming machine, which defeats the point of any modular system.
PCs are not machines that have unified memory,
Low end PC's using APU's absolutely do. And yet they are clearly less well suited to gaming than high end systems. Of course I understand that unified memory makes the devs life simpler - which is great, and it's easier to screw up performance with discrete memory pools. But there are also clear performance advantages of discrete memory pools in the form of higher overall bandwidth and capacity with no contention between the CPU and GPU.
In addition, PS3 and some earlier consoles did not have unified memory, so are we to say that those games consoles weren't intended for gaming?
guaranteed access to a full suite of modern gpu features
Of course they do if you have the right components. All you need is Windows 11 and a modern GPU and you have guaranteed access to the same suite of GPU features seen for example on the Xbox Series X - even to the extent of using largely the same API. I get that you're probably stating this from a developer point of view because it's easier for you if the entire target market conforms to a single spec, but that's hardly the case even in console land where you have to target Switch, PS4/XBO and current gen consoles. It's a fact of life that devs will always need to cater for multiple target platforms with different feature sets, PC's expand that somewhat (depending on how widely the net is cast) but that doesn't make the platform less fit or unintended for gaming - it's simply a side effect of the upgradable nature of the platform.
That may make developers lives more difficult, but hey, almost all games get released on PC these days so from a commercial point of view it's obviously worth it. And from an end user point of view, there's no reason why a gamer who's machine has a "full suite of modern gpu features" should be told their machine is less fit for gaming that a potentially less capable and less feature rich console.
, are designed around super tight control of background tasks to avoid stealing resources from the current program (of course they're not! For many PCs in many environments the background tasks are just as, if not more, important than what is currently being run -- they could be IT software, bank databases syncing, whatever,)
Why does this mean they aren't intended for gaming? If you want to want to run a bank database on your gaming PC while playing a game (lol) then go right ahead. Your performance will be lower, perhaps unplayable even but that's a user choice, not something that has been forced upon you because the system itself is unsuitable for gaming. That's like saying a Lamborghini is unsuitable for racing because in theory I can choose to fit a tow bar and tow a caravan with it while in a race and it would therefore perform worse than a car without a tow bar.
PC's absolutely require a greater degree of user knowledge to perform optimally while gaming, but as with many, many pieces of technology, just because they require user knowledge to operate, does not mean they are unsuited to the task, or not intended to perform it.
have a set, universal waterline of performance or access features that developers can be sure there's a good financial ROI on targeting, and, yeah, don't have fixed configurations you can pre-compile shaders for. All of these things make them *less fit for running games -- no game is going to ship such that every user has the intended experience, or no situation will result in a 100ms hitch for any number of reasons.
That's the whole reason for scalability in games. You seem to be operating from the position of users *should* be locked down to a specific hardware configuration and specific developer selected settings, and only that makes for a genuine/fit gaming system. But that's totally in opposition to a very large section of the market that don't want to play games like that. And PC's cater to that section of the market. Just because that section of the market can be more tricky to accommodate from a games developer point of view does not make it any less valid of a way to play games, and by extension does not make the platform that enables games to be played in that way any less of a legitimate, or capable gaming platform.
Case in point, PC's can and do offer significantly improved gaming experiences over consoles in the vast majority of games with the correct hardware. So how can that be the case for a system less fit or unsuited for running games?
That is not an excuse for not delivering a great experience to those players who do have the hardware, the knowledge, and the care to provide an environment where the game ought to be able to do just that -- a developer can use cutting edge graphics APIs only available to some users, trust nobody is running something silly in the background, write streaming and loading code that leverages the big surplus of vram and ram this user spent thousands of dollars to provide instead of unified memory, and keep their shader variant count low and then carefully keep track of 99% of the variants that actually matter, and precompile those in a menu. However, while it isn't an excuse, it is something your boss will de-prioritize under other important tasks, because only 30% of your players are on PC, only 50% of them have that perfect gaming pc and knowledge, and only 10% of those will complain.
Essentially, you're saying here that a platform which has more development challenges on account of its open and scalable nature is less well suited for and not intended for gaming, despite its capability to provide both a better, more flexible and more customizable gaming experience for the end user which is exactly what a large segment of gamers want. I'd have to disagree. You're absolutely correct that consoles are preferable to PC's as a target platform from a developer point of view. But it doesn't follow that from an end user point of view they are less fit or outright unintended to play games. And since we're talking about end user expectations here, that's the perspective that should matter. After all, supply is there to serve demand, not the other way around.
