You can't really blame the people who buy and play games on consoles for the industry woes that folks who prefer to game on PCs get up in arms about. You can however quite frequently blame them for being ignorant blowhards who seemingly revel in their lack of knowledge as if that was a badge of honor to be worn openly. Likewise, amongst the (and I use this in the most satirical sense possible here) "PC-gaming master race", you have a lot of jerks who resort to personal attacks and bullshit assertions that amount to "playing games on consoles makes you retarded" standing amongst the folks like me making rational arguments.
The only thing console gamers are "guilty" of is being a part of a large market segment that has encouraged developers to shift their primary development focus towards the console market (they might also be idiots, but anyone can be so we'll ignore that for the moment). Why is that a problem? Well it wouldn't be, if the current generation of consoles wasn't ancient and extremely rickety. The X-Box 360, at the time of its debut, was about the equivalent of a decent gaming PC, albeit one with decided bottlenecks that negatively impact things like texture memory capacity. That was 6 years ago. Microsoft thinks the 360 still has almost 5 years of life in it, and has no immediate plans to release a new console to replace it.
Perhaps you don't pay very much attention, but 6 years in technology terms is practically ancient history - the rate of advancement and improvement that technology undergoes is just ridiculously fast-paced and consoles are, by their very design, static. New iterations might improve them slightly or fix defects in the manufacturing, but while a brand new design of the X-Box 360 may have a larger hard drive or crash less, it isn't going to be any more powerful than the original model was - it would defeat the purpose if it was. So we're looking at a design that had definite flaws on day one (that had nothing to do with whether or not it worked properly, that's another matter entirely) that may be 10 or more years out of date by the time a replacement arrives on the market.
Why is that a problem? Well it wouldn't be, if the X-Box 360 was just its own niche market - that kind of support for an older and outdated system would be frankly fantastic. But the 360 isn't this niche piece of hardware with its own cadre of dedicated fans, it's a mainstream device that's not considered by the market to be the woefully out of date clunker that it is. But why is that actually a problem? Think for a moment about the rise of mobile gaming on smartphones and iOS devices - some people see it as a horrible influx of casual gaming nonsense to be up in arms about, but sensible people see it as technology marching forward and functionality converging across what used to be distinct platforms; some of us remember phones you actually had to dial after all, now a device that fits in my pocket has more functionality than my first desktop computer did (smaller screen though, what with being pocket-sized).
So mobile-gaming, whether or not you partake, is pretty cool, and titles like Infinity Blade show that you can do some very impressive things with fairly limited hardware, and that is also cool.
[HEADING=3]Now I would like for any console-only gamer who is reading this to imagine for a moment that, instead of developing and releasing games designed on and for the 360/PS3 natively, game developers designed everything for the iPhone first and then ported it to your systems.[/HEADING]
If your reaction would be "What the hell is this bullshit?!", congratulations - you've just experienced what it's been like to be a PC gamer for bloody ages now. Ever since consoles became the mainstream development platform of choice for so many AAA game studios, we've entered this bizarre reality where the design architecture of an ancient 6-year old device is dictating what games can do on brand new computers, because the developers design them all on the 360, and then port them to other platforms, all of which are quite a bit more powerful than the 360 (except of course the Wii, but the Wii is just irrelevant in this arena). That is, quite clearly, ass backwards - it's easy to scale things down to account for the inherent restrictions of a less powerful platform because scaling down involves cutting things out or down (gameplay elements, size of zones, etc) and making them not as good, but it's comparatively much harder and time consuming to scale things up when you start development at the bottom rung of the tech ladder - scaling up is an additive process that involves new content creation.
Which is why there is so much complaining these days - it is way the hell easier to just design a game to work on consoles and port it all but untouched over to the PC than it is to design it for consoles and then extensively rework it so that the PC version is actually playing to the strengths of the platform; we're considered fortunately these days when we get games where all the UI prompts are referencing actual keys and not buttons on a non-existent gamepad, and the only "differentiation" between most multi-platform releases is that the PC version can probably display things in higher resolutions and might have slightly nicer looking textures. There is so much potential being squandered, and the games we're delivered are objectively not as good as they would be if developers "shot for the moon first, but then settled for low-earth orbit".
And that is what starts this whole ridiculous animosity - it shouldn't matter that this generation of consoles is massively out of date on ye olde technology curve, but it does because the hardware limitations of consoles are informing game design for all platforms, and if a game is released for both consoles and PCs the version we get is generally an afterthought. And then ignorant blowhards get smug and make asinine suggestions like "Why don't you just buy it for the consoles then, herp a derp derp!" that make even reasonable people want to punch them in their stupid stupid faces, and flame wars start. But our problem isn't with you, the person who buys and plays games on a console, it's with the developers pandering to you at our collective expense - more people would do well to remember that and just let us vent our well-earned ire in peace. When we complain about consoles, you don't need to defend them - your X-Box doesn't give a shit how much you think it's great anymore than the system I cobbled together from individual components and have been continuously upgrading in stages for 5 or so years cares about how much I love it; we're discussing cold unfeeling machines people, acknowledging facts about them doesn't make your experience with them become less enjoyable.
