I am a traditionalist. And as @Rurouni and @Nesh and @shredenvain denvain have mentioned already, having a close hardware has many advantages. Look at the Xbox One, it uses 3 OSes, they can tweak everything around per user feedback, they can control every little bit of the hardware and its firmwares. It's theirs, and you can make it UNIQUE. At the same time the experience is universal for everyone who owns the closed hardware.You seem to be too in love with the physical hardware. No one in this thread wants game development and user experience development to end. We just want choice and convenience. As long as the UI and input mechanisms are consistent (and good), and online MP is balanced, then who cares what hardware is under the hood?
Look where this generation's hardware went - absolutely low end crap. It's just a business reality that consoles can't continue to be loss leaders, so they will never again pack cutting edge hardware. Why not break that cycle completely and give users the choice of what they want in terms of performance, features, and graphical capabilities?
You can drive a Ferrari F50, and a Mercedes Gullwing, even a train or a plane (in sims and games)...but is it the same as having those very rare cars and so on in real life? It will never be. Also closed hardware can run streamed games, so what's the problem?
I like hardware on consoles, I like the physical things. I like not to depend on connections, internet and stuff. I like the real things. For mobiles, streaming is fine in my eyes though.