I suspect that at some point in this generation, they will offer consoles with SSDs although probably not for the reasons you stated. Instead, they will probably offer it for cost reasons. The problem with hard disks is that because they are all mechanical, even though drive sizes get bigger, getting a smaller drive isn't cheaper. They had this issue on the original Xbox where although there was only 8 GB formatted, they were putting 20 GB drives or something like that at the end of the lifecycle.
I suspect that's the main reason they made an Xbox 360 without hard drives. Microsoft got boned on the Xbox because they couldn't make a profit late in the lifecycle because they couldn't reduce their manufacturing costs because of the HD and the fact that they used off the shelf components. (Microsoft actually sued Nvidia if I recall correctly over this, which is probably why they switched to AMD on the 360 I imagine)
SSD prices are decreasing like crazy, so I imagine a Xbox One or PS4 will be released once they can get one for less than $40 that can fit a fair amount of games. Since everything runs off the hard disk, and they are on blu-rays (meaning each game may be 25-50 GB of data), it might be a while.
There is little advantage to the console these days other than games are guaranteed to work forever, which is appealing to me because I play a bunch of old games (I discussed this in another thread).
I suspect the new consoles are going to show their age a lot sooner compared to PC because they aren't using exotic top of the line hardware. I would wager that this generation is the last of the generation of expensive upgrades every 5 years. I imagine now that they are essentially PCs, they'll move to the iPad/Ouya model putting out more hardware revs just because they switched to off the shelf hardware, which I suspect will be better for developers and consumers.
The developer advantage is that better hardware will be available to them, so they have to worry less about optimizations.
The consumer advantage is that the will be guaranteed backwards compatibility and consoles won't be so darn expensive.
At that point there will be minimal difference between a PC and consoles, but consoles will have the advantage of being able to get closer to the hardware, and can optimize for specific hardware configurations rather than trying to get it run on infinity billion different hardware configurations. PCs will be like android and consoles will be like iOS, and I think while Apple has more rules, developing for the iOS hardware is better.
Or the steam machine will crush them all! Or the Ouya. Who knows!
