Another way to look at this is on the amount of money consumers shelled out to for each platform. Just using vgcharts numbers (For simplicity let's assume 20GB and 60GB SKUs were an even split):
4mil units * $250 = $1Bil USD
1.41 units * ~$550 = $0.77Bil USD
Considering the price of a PS3, the numbers are impressive. The Wii attracted only 22% more dollars than the PS3. I think it's fair to look at it this way since the products are priced very differently and are functionally completely different products as well. This is the same reason why comparing bicycle sales numbers with motorcycle sales volumes directly is not usualy very relevant.
Your angle has some major holes though:
1. Games sell at a roughly fixed price. The console is the "lamp" and the games are the fuel. Regardless of the cost of the console, there is a $40-$60 cost for games. i.e. Publisher profits. Hence what matters to publishers is Units * Attach Rate, as Units * Attach Rate = Profits.
Publishers absolutely don't care if customers are investing "more" into your platform; actually they do care because higher costs mean a. less money potentually invested in software and b. the larger technical curve means higher development costs.
2. Consumers are likewise stratisfied. The old sayings like, "5% of people make 95% of all money" and so forth.
Use cars as an anology. A nice Lexus is a better product than a Kia. But only 5% can buy the Enzo; 95% the Kia. So a 20:1 user ratio; yet that 1 Enzo costs about as much as 20 Kias! So technically consumers are investing the same amount of money. For arguements sake, lets assume Kia and Lexus both brake even with their cars.
Now as a FUEL salesman, which is more relevant?
I would rather sell fuel to 20 Kias than to 1 Enzo because there is much more potential sales to all those Kias.
The fact is the number of consumers willing to pay $500+ for a console is a limited market. We know this for a FACT as history has shown this. How big is the market? There is no firm number. I thought before launch it was at least 6M strong, but no one knows for certain.
But at the end of the day if Sony (or MS) consoles themselves with, "Yes, Wii outsold us, but our consumers invested more total money for consoles" then they are totally misguided -- and publishers are certain to let them know this in no uncertain terms.
The numbers you present can be turned many ways, although I think the above 2 points invalidate how you use them. For that matter, one could (wrongly, IMO) use your numbers to demonstrate an annual "cap" consumers are willing to invest. But in the end the value of "consumer dollars invested" must be viewed in consumer spending power and how it is stratisfied (i.e. more people at the bottom than at the top) and that potentially more money spent on hardware is less spent on software (all things even).
If you compared the PS3 launch with the PS2 launch based on dollars the market was willing to spend, it is very impressive.
And somehow the concept of "supply limited" and the reality supply limited launches obscurve a little thing called "demand" still evades this thread
Put more plainly, if Product-A has a 20M unit demand and Product-B has a 5M unit demand, if each only ship 1M units the actual demand is obscured by the limitations of supply. And if you really want to start digging at it from your angle you not only need to consider inflation, but also things like scope of launch (e.g. the PS2 shipped earlier in Japan, but also racked up over 5M sales in its first 9 months)
, I cried 
