Dat MegaDrive love doe
Yeah, I'm starting to think they will be similarly priced. At most, Sony comes in $50 cheaper. Honestly they would not have any issue with PS5 @ $499, at least for the first year. People who want it are going to buy it regardless.
Anyways, on the general topic of unique features of PS5 and XSX, I think it's clear by now we can't downplay the speed and possibility of PS5's faster SSD. That WILL enable some things on PS5 that will be very difficult to replicate on XSX, hands down.
HOWEVER, I think we shouldn't downplay XSX's CU advantage either. I've seen everyone referring to the GPU for simply graphics-orientated tasks, but these systems are actually excellent for GPGPU (general purpose GPU) programming tasks as well. Non-graphics tasks that are friendly to scalability and parallelism can take advantage of the GPU processing for things such as physics, AI, logic, and other non-graphical tasks. In fact we saw this with PS4, and we'll see it with both systems next-gen.
With that said, XSX has a pretty clear advantage on this front, with the extra 16 CUs. That gives it a near 2 TF extra throughput for GPGPU tasks that the PS5 simply cannot replicate without toning down processing in some other area, such as graphical complexity and/or graphical fidelity. Using the GPU for non-graphics tasks also helps free up the CPU from those tasks, so that can give the CPU freedom for either yet MORE non-graphics tasks, pushing framerates, or a mix of both.
This is as much an advantage for XSX as the SSD is for PS5, IMHO, and worth taking into consideration. Of course, smart utilization of it will be up to how well devs can achieve parallelism in their programming tasks to saturate the GPU, which might be a challenge. It might also be a feature you see more from 1st-party than 3rd-party. The good thing is that many non-graphical tasks are scalable themselves, so that could help devs in pushing for GPU saturation.
I'm interested if MS will start to talk more about this; again PS5 can do all of these same things but the lack of the other 16 CUs XSX has DOES mean it will be less capable of it without sacrificing on some areas to do so. At some point in the future I'd like to look into some scenarios of how the PS5 SSD/ XSX CUs advantages can play out for games specifically targeting the respective strengths of their hardware.