PS1 gave awesome fun, and PS2 gave awesome games and mind-blowing new experiences. I can't grumble about those generations. The SNES era was all platformers IMO, and pretty dull, but I was gaming on Amiga and that was as good as it gets (regards new experiences superbly executed).
I've been there for all of these, and definitely some great stuff on all of these, but there was a lot of painful stuff on the PS1. The early days of 3D don't hold up that well for the most part. If I look back, many of the games I played were versions of games I'd played before, and didn't offer that much new. The PS2 wasn't all that different, but was helped a lot by 3D graphics becoming decent enough - games like Jack & Daxter were 3D, looked pleasing to the eye and had no load-times. I played a tonne of Tekken again though and way more Gran Turismo.
I think for the PS3 gen, the online part of it made it stand out immensely. Online leaderboards are great, as are content sharing a la LBP2, ModNation, SingStar, etc., or being able to buy a new pinball table for $2 for a game that only cost like 7 bucks to begin with, of a quality that would have been a full-price game a generation ago (I was a big fan of the Pro-Pinball series, and have been a fan of many a Pinball game in the past). Shooters, racers and Warhawk type multiplayer really make that genre stand out, and although that started before this gen, people are wearing strange spectacles if it isn't clear how much better online gaming was this generation.
What this generation misses most is something that is new in the style of GTA4 / Open World. An almost completely new type of game. It's been too hard for something like that to break through on consoles because developing for them had become too risky and expensive, although MineCraft is something that's coming close. Motion controls have made up for that in some part, but not for most of the hardcore (myself excluded, because I love it). I know you haven't touched that aspect at all, which to me is almost unfathomable, as they have been a revelation to me.
I know in my heart that for me the Amiga / Atari ST days were the best, and if you look at it from a sheer breath of experience and innovation, that's probably largely well-deserved. But other than that, this era is definitely a high point for me. It's easy to gloss over the many accomplishments of this generation, where small downloadable titles are often better than almost anything from previous generations.
The highs of previous generations stay in the mind in a compressed form, and it's easy to lose track of how much we've gotten this generation, especially taking into account that we're still going to get quite a lot out of it in the next two years.
I also don't expect the console experience to go away. It will just evolve. On the next generation, you'll be able to play most apps. I saw a virtualisation project the other day that runs Android apps on PC very well. That's the kind of thing I'm sure we'll see happen more, as the smaller mobile/innovation stuff will simply run on most devices including those in the living room. We'll see more and more devices, and they'll all be able to do more and more, with overlap. This isn't going to go away.
The real question is what gaming interfaces are going to look like next-gen. If we're going to be in an era with proper voice-recognition, 3D support for HMD and body tracking combined with everything else we can expect, that could end up giving some weird new experiences, and they're not likely to become things you're going to do on your phone. Freedom of input is one of the things that I feel have held console game development back compared to say, the keyboard generations. The freedom of movement that motion controls provide give back some of that freedom of 'expression' if you will, but now I want my freedom of linguistic expression back too. It will have to be better than just understanding basic command though - it needs to be at least a vocal equivalent of what you could type into Leisure Suit Larry, and respond in at least as creative a manner.
And if that part is solved by having all the parts in your game being played by actual humans that talk back, I can live with that too, but I could see the value of having proper 'actors' being set up to respond to you.
But I haven't seen anything on iPad/mobile that entertains in the same way. So maybe I'm not casual and just cheap. I am deliberately avoiding games that are too long though. I would have played Skyrim in the same way I played Morrowind, but I'm not losing those hours. 