By Anandtech trial of benchmarking A7 it seems like an astounding ahievement as it gets almost Silvermont performance and wattage but at a 28nm process!. I give Silvermont the win over Jaguar by being in 22nm. At 28nm and without turbo it surely would be worse at the same wattage. But A7 is another history. Sony should have bought an ARM design and put 16 of those chips inside.
I think there are significant differences in design that make Silvermont a better arch from power perspective. Turbo is here and is significant to the design, you can't remove (even more add it) at whim. I would bet that Silvermont would be more power efficient than Jaguar even if Intel were to produce it on 28nm process. There are multiple reasons behind my claim, from the decoder, to the FP/SIMD units (in order), pipeline length (Atom is design to clock well it is not out of magic that it can turbo really high and I think quite often), etc. Jaguar is a more complex CPU core overall.
The A7 is pretty impressive, it outperforms A15, that is quite something but it is not available to Sony (or msft for that matter), that is the first shipping CPU compliant with the ARm v8 ISA.
A57 would have been possibly a good choice, but it is too late.
As a side note Apple just proved that you are way better off with fewer and better CPU cores (backed by what seems to be a good memory subsystem) than with more lesser CPU cores (and the impact on the memory sub system: more clients, most likely more latencies, more power, etc.)
I'm not sure 16 CPU cores is the best idea.
On the GPU side, well Rogue GPU and late Adreno GPU are great but it is tough to make a comparison with desktop parts, they are supposed to scale well, I guess "supposed" is the proper wording, it is a tough bet to do vs Nvidia or AMD proven high performances, high power, GPUs.
Imo the only manufacturer that could design something significantly better than AMD, investing ~ the same amount of silicon and within the same thermal characteristics, was Intel.
Intel could have design something that may have run around both Orbis and Durango with regard to the CPU perfs and deliver ~the same GPU performances and top of the line GPGPU performances (people forget but Intel GPU are impressive in both perfs per watt and perfs per mm^2 when dealing with compute workload). The issue is that Intel lack the intensive to design something custom and to sell it at an affordable price.
As a side I would not bury Intel that early, baytrail is great, I'm still waiting for proper measurement wrt to power consumption and the die size. THe 14nm version comes next year, so does Haswell shrink. They are facing tough competition, like it did not happened in a long while, but they are doing the right thing and are still the best at their job be CPU desing or process.
I'm not sure they are going to win, though I would not declare that they are to lose, it is too early imo.
EDIT
I missed that part of your post:
My conclussion: new gen will not last 5 years until next one. Or Apple will dominate console gaming selling an official controller and a hdmi connection. If let´s say Iphone 7 is powerful enough ( they already are at 1 billion transsitors, is not crazy to thing A9 would be in the same ballpark as PS4 APU ) i am sure Rockstar and the likes will be willing to make versions of GTA 7 in IOS. The advantage smartphone and tablet makers have is that new processes are used not only for reducing heat and cost but to improve performance while console manufacturers not.
I agree at this point I would be surprised if nobody enter the market (apple, google / whoever it is), the entry bar in perfs is low and with 20nm/14nm ahead and new breakthrough in memory technology it should be doable to compete at a sane price (/without subsidizing hardware).
For Apple and the A9, technology ain't that great
the lowest hanging fruits are the easiest one to harvest, they are reaching the point where you pay more and more (silicon and power) to grab less and less extra performances. Though a chip intended for a home console does have to be designed and operated with the constrains of a tablet/phone SoC.
