this is a little bit taking it into the extreme side dont you think ? sony was a hardware company from the very beginning, Microsoft a software one from the very beginning, you cant jump from one into the other that easily and safely do you ? I mean just look at what happened to them with xbox1 (they were obliged litterally to stop producing these things, they were loosing money like crazy, thats not in my dictionary the best definition of competent hardware designers and architects, they litterally assembled a PC not a console), and for xbox360 hardware failure scandal....
Funny you bring up the xbox 1 as an engineering failure. It might have been business failure but not an engineering one. On the contrary, compared to the 360, well compared to almost any other console, it was very powerful and very durable, it was a damn tank. From that point of view actually, for being their first console and their first major hardware adventure I would say they manged their hardware jump extremely well.
That MS did crap deals and could not bring down costs is a whole different story. It does not matter that they assembled a PC into a console form, that was not the problem. If that is the case then then they should have the same problem with the 360 and from the looks of it both the PS4 and next xbox will be basically PC hardware. Should we expect MS/Sony to be screwed next gen because of that?...