Annoying Old Party Man said:
Also, what the general public views as "better" should never be the main criteria for judging a product.
The analogy with the ipod is somewhat relevant, i think. There are better products in the market in the same price range, but the public ignores it because it thinks the ipod is the "better" product, or because the public is satissfied with the ipod features as it is.
Actually though, that really is the best criteria for judging a technological product. At least, one that is actually being marketed to the general public (obviously it'd be different if you were making a military product, or a product for use in scientific research). Technology doesn't just expand in one direction, it expands in multiple directions at once. If the public doesn't latch onto a particular path, that doesn't mean that path is bad, it simply means
it's not good enough yet.
The public isn't saying the PS360 aren't powerful and awesome, they're saying they're not powerful and awesome enough yet to really care about. Whereas the Wii is unique enough to care about.
Like your analogy: Blu ray really offers a better experience than a DVD, but the general public has not adopted it due to many factors, from price to unfamiliarity to not being different enough, etc etc.
But no, it really doesn't. It offers the same picture in high definition and more storage space. These are all great things, and certainly an improvement over what we have. But is it a good enough improvement to actually spend money on? The general public believes they can do better, and they're willing to stick with what they have until technology makes the necessary jumps. Meanwhile, streaming and downloading video is taking off like gangbusters, because it's a technology that is now good enough for the public to care about it. It existed before, and was better than what was out there, but it wasn't good enough to be significant yet.
In fact, the Wii is
exactly the same. Motion sensing technology for games existed years before, but no one cared, because it just wasn't good enough at the time to be significant, so even if it was the better technological road to go down, people weren't yet willing to spend their money on it. Nintendo has improved that tech, and now it's good enough that the public will buy it, which will fund the next step in technological evolution. That next step will include improvements to motion sensing, but what we've got now has been determined
good enough until something significantly better comes along.
Personally, i think that the Wii is perhaps one of the few consoles - if not the only one in history after the Atari perhaps- that is a market leader while not being the relatively objectively better gaming platform (there isn't necessarily a "better" this time). PS2, PSONE, SNES, NES, they were all the systems with the features and overall support which elevated them to the preferable choice for all gamers, from the casual one to the hardcore. And i find this fascinating, that Nintendo managed to turn the market upside down and shoot itself to the very top while doing exactly the same it has done over the last three generations , pushing unique interfaces and relying solely and exclusively to it's own products to sell their systems.
Neither SNES nor PS1 were objectively better, they were both up against consoles that had their own strengths and, from certain perspectives, could easily be considered 'better'. Using the word objective is a stretch in any circumstance though.