You are partly right because system requirements for multiplatform games were bumped up when the new consoles were released. However, for a significant part of the core PC gamer market the only thing needed for a better-than-console experience is a GPU upgrade, while for some even that is unnecessary. I agree that the price for the 1080p+/60fps/max settings experience has gone up a bit, due of course to the new consoles bumping up specs, but I would argue that everything else has gotten cheaper. Even if you're now getting into PC gaming for the first time, stuff like the Alienware Alpha offer a surprisingly capable experience while building a better-than-console PC gaming rig really is quite cheap.
The consoles aren't shit, it's easy to match them with entry level hardware so it doesn't mean much.
Next year when pascal is out (theoretically almost doubling performance across the line) , as long as prices do not go up AGAIN to just slot newer higher performance gpus in among the old lineup instead of replacing them (which I fear they will) then price/performance might look better again (for gpus at least)
Next year we'll be in the same 3 years after console release spec bump time as we were in last gen during 2008-2009.
You need to keep in mind that:
-this time the consoles were much much weaker than pc hardware at the time of their release (especially the cpu, but the gpu too) relative to the ps3/xbox360 at the time of their release.
-despite that it still costs more to match console performance than it did in 2009.
Imagine if these consoles hadn't sucked... you'd be looking at an i5 and r9 280 to match them.
In early 2009 130 euros got you a cpu that demolishhhhhed the consoles by as much as a 250 euro i5 does today.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2721
this article is a good reminder of the effect competition had on cpu prices.
Relative price/performance has doubled for the cpu (thankfully stayed the same for motherboard and ram)
There is no performance/dollar increase coming next year for cpus so it's going to stay like this... There has'nt been one since the i5 2500k (190 euros in 2011, vs 245 euro i5 4690k in 2015)
There won't be one till zen releases in 2017, and even then there might not be one if amd let us down.
In early 2009 130 euros got me a hd4870 which was a good 4x faster than the gpu in the consoles and ran everything at much higher than console resolution, at much higher than console settings at well over 60 fps.
I'd always get at least 3x console framerates in multiplatform games at higher resolution.
Hell the xbox one is barely 60 percent faster than that gpu... that's how good it was for 2009 (or how bad the xbone is depending on your perspective

)
Now 140 euros gets you a 750ti which just matches the ps4 and it's already vram bottlenecked at 1080p (which the 4870 would not be for another 2 years after I bought it,and wouldn't have been for 4 years had I spent an extra 15 euros on the 1GB version, but mistakes were made

)
The 750ti's successor just launched (950 ) and you can guess it... it just slotted in alongside the 750ti price/performance wise instead of replacing it, performs 30 percent better and costs 30 percent more.
This is my point, you're saying the consoles just released (no they released 2 years ago) and you expect the price/performance gap to grow like it did last gen.
That's how it goes these days, prices just slowly creep up with every new hardware launch, now the entry level costs more than the midrange used to. So the price/performance gap between aging consoles and new hardware is increasing much slower than last gen.
in 2009 there was the 4850, the 4770 , the 4750 , and then the 4670 entry level card (that still beat the consoles handily). The 4670 cost 75 euros in Q3 2008 and came with 512MB vram (no bottleneck just like the 4870)
You could get the same entry level console killer experience with a 50 euro athlon II (still get 60 fps with it too) and a 75 euro hd4670.
Now you're either heavily compromising with a 70 euro pentium (or some garbage amd apu that'll bottleneck you to hell in every single threaded game, aka no arma or tera for you) to get that console (ugh) experience or you at least need an i3 (130 euros ) to get an entry level PC standard experience).
Seriously , the entry level console killer in 2009 was about 350 euros...
550 euros got you that sweet bang for buck midrange pc that felt powerful and did not feel like you were compromising, and you didn't even have to buy gutter tier power supply/cases or leave out an aftermarket cpu cooler to get to that number.
Now you're looking at 450-500 euros for less relative performance and about 950 euros for a midrange bang for buck build that doesn't feel like you're having to compromise or bottleneck in games.
I think you'll agree that an i5 is the minimum for a medium range build that isn't going to cpu bottleneck you on a 60 hz monitor and that the 390/970 are the bang for buck midrange gpus atm)
You and durante are right that you can still beat the consoles for pretty cheap, but I'm really not interested in that as a pc gamer.
I compare what I got for my money now vs what I got for my money before , ON PC, not on some platform where expectations are really low.
And what I see (and what my wallet saw) is that shit got a lot more expensive.
My budget for parts isn't much bigger than it was 6 years ago, but i'm not nearly getting as much bang for my buck anymore because of the state of the hardware industry.
Maybe if you can afford 650 euros for a 980ti and 600 euros for a 6 core broadwell you don't really care because you'll just spend what it takes to get the best, but for us whose experience is limited by our budget it fucking sucks.