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Atrocities said:
I would have to invest 1500 into a new system just to play some of the new games coming out. In a year or two I would have to dump another 400 to 800 dollars into upgrades just to keep semi current.
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That has always been the case, though. There have always been a few titles pushing the bleeding edge... Of course, in modern times games tend to be a lot better with running on lower-spec PCs than they used to be in the past. Much work has gone into making very scalable rendering engines. Sure you can't play Bioschock on a PC from 1995, but it doesn't require $2000 of PC to play it. The only reason to spend so much money on hardware is if you just have to run games with every setting turned up to the max. Very few, if any, games ever actually require such expensive PCs to play. Its just bad business on the part of the developers to restrict their target market so much...
Consoles have almost always been a pseudo "low cost alternative." They always start out near the cutting edge of PC technology (though generally a bit behind the curve), then fall quickly behind. The modern industry is hardly any different than it was 10, 15 years ago. Hopefully the Wii will shake things up and bring the game industry out of the graphics-fetish slump it has been stuck in for a while...