My "I think they're pretty bad" was a reply to the "in any other september Xbox one sales are great", not about the PS4.
I'm benchmarking against the second best selling consoles and overall market sales.
At which point we move into the Wii discussion much earlier in the thread than normal.
If you're benchmarking against the Wii to begin with, you're comparing very disparate market segments. If you're then benchmarking the XBO against "the second best selling console" last generation, namely the 360, then you're benchmarking it against the best selling system targeted at the same segments these new systems are targeting.
If you think that 820K HW units is a low expectation for a non-holiday month for two systems targeting the core market segment... then I don't really know how realistic your expectations are considering there are only like ten instances of non-holiday months in which that was exceeded in the decade between 2002 and 2012. I'd say your expectations are unrealistically high, not that everyone else's are a low bar.
Also, I should probably clarify, I consider the home and handheld markets relatively distinct, so I should probably write in erratum - the home console market had good hardware sales, the handheld market continues to be terrible.