I totally agree with you. Consoles may have some advantages(usability, optimization, hardware uniformness, etc...), but the disadvantages(licences, censorship, pricing, forced gimmicks, obsolesce) far outnumber them. Imagine if the film industry or the music industry worked liked the game industry. Imagine a world where in order to play disney movies you'd have to buy a disney movie console. To the hell with that world. As a gamer one of the things that really pisses me off is that I grew up with nintendo (and later sony) and I like their games a lot. In case of nintendo, their console hardware just suck. No matter how much I try I just can't convince myself to drop $200~300 on machines that only play a few selected games using some really old tech and have a few other uses. Same thing for sony. I'd love to play Uncharted and the PS3 God of War games as well as the tons of console exclusive third party games, and I think the Vita has some really good content(at least here in Japan). But, by buying a sony(or nintendo(and microsoft/sega/atari/bandai/polystation and even ouya)) console you're getting sucked into a walled garden more closed than anything that even Apple has developed yet. I just posted that comment because if sony wants to be an asshole at least be honest about it and do it right.

... but it's way beyond the time to let it go. I remember back in 2006~7 when all the good games(at least here in Japan) were still being released for the PS2 while the PS3 was left to gather dust.
Now sony only needs to kill the PSP too, as it is cannibalizing all the sales the vita could have and as well as dividing developers (some are scratching their game's vita versions in favor of the PSP and others are developing for both).
Sony should learn that no risk no return. Apple kills successful products all the time in favor of better versions(ipod classic -> iDevices; macbook -> macbook air). If sony wants to be the Japanese Apple they could learn a thing or two.

Well guess what: I can find Tegra 3 boards available right now Japanese only
Plus if you are a corporation you can buy chips and board design reference documentation directly from nvidia. It's not hard. Any corporation can do it.
Also, please, don't confuse devkit boards with final commercial products. They're professional tools made for engineers in very low quantities. Dev kits are VERY expensive because of that.
Anyway I'm leaving this obviously biased discussion. Getting tagged as troll for being realistic and exposing some facts while some guy gets tagged Informative for nothing? Just don't be surprised if the Ouya ends up in the same shelve as the "Polystation" or those chinese N64 controller/console things you see in crappy hotels all over the world.

The big whoop is that it's a game console from kickstarter. That is it. It's trendy, people that don't know how to use money will buy it.

Out of curiosity, why you said that?
Delivering a hardware is not a hard thing to do, specially if you have 7 million dollars in the bank and are using common commercial components(you can easily buy a Tegra 3 board).
I believe now they're probably customizing the Android OS for their proprietary needs and set upping their own appstore. Neither which really is that hard either.
In my opinion the real challenge hasn't even started yet: marketing the final product. If they can't convince developers to create exclusive content as well as convince the average consumer to buy the device they probably go down soon after the release. If sony is failing to successfully move the Vita out of the shelves even though it has the playstation brand, is homebrew friendly(PS Mobile SDK), has hardware comparable to the latest flagship smartphones and over 100 real games(almost a 1000 if you also count PSP and PS1 downloadable titles) due (mostly) to the insufficient marketing that they have right now, then the OUYA better be prepared.
Personally they still haven't convinced me to buy it instead of just plug in my Android phone to the TV. My japanese Xperia acro hd came with a charging dock. I can just put my phone on it and then connect it to the TV using a HDMI cable. For the controller a PS3, Wii pro controller, Wiimote or any of the dozens of bluetooth controllers for PC/Android work, Plus I can just use Google Play to buy the game which will work on any android device I own, instead of having yet another third party store to keep track and that will only be usable on one device.
Finally, on a completely different subject, how the hell is your post modded Informative? What new information did Xugumad add to the discussion?

By your logic then everybody who wants to do embedded programing should buy a freaking arduino.
If you know the basics of programing and electronics and the product developer has the necessary documentations available(datasheets and sample programs) it really doesn't matter what you use. Linux is the same linux. Electronics are the same electronics(Analog, SPI, UART, HDMI, etc). The Raspberry is decent but it has problems and limitations. I actually very recently got an ODROID-X2 board and most my knowledge from previously using a Tegra2 Toradex board was completely transferable. And if I have a problem I can't solve by myself, just looking at the info from other boards, including the Raspberry, is enough.

I agree with you are saying, but there is one small problem in your post: you're dealing with revenues. It's better, but no sufficient, to talk using net profits or losses. For example, in their latest report Sony post a revenue of $20 billion. Would you consider them part of the "Pack of Four"? As much as I like (parts of) them, I wouldn't.

Lazy devs are a issue in all ages. Even something as simple as changing the target device and maybe changing a couple of parameters of a project can make people moan. Plus resource intensive apps may still require some low level code. "Luckily" such apps seem to be very rare on the consumer mobile app market.

Let alone backwards software compatibility. Recompile and debug all those iOS and NDK based Android apps all over again doesn't sound something developers will like.

I'm assuming that my mistake was the word "scape", which should I should have written "escape".
As a foreigner I more than welcome people pointing out my English grammar mistakes, as one of the reasons I even bother posting on internet forums is to train my written English on a more causal environment(living and working in Japan is destroying both my English and even my native Russian skills). But please make it more visible next time. Thanks anyway.

Ubuntu may get a lot of trash talking from the computer savy comunity(and for valid reasons), but for the average Joe it's an excellent OS. For mundane tasks I actually find it easier to use then Mac and windows combined. If it was backed by big OEMs and had a good marketing strategy behind it it would be easily at least as popular as Android is on the phones(as suggested by Linus himself during that infamous "Fuck you Nvidia" video). And even though I'm recently converted to KDE Mint, I still hope Ubuntu becomes a mainstream OS someday. It's commercial success will indirectly contribute to the advance of other Linux distros as well with better driver support, more software and more interest in the OSS concepts as well.

Just a personal opinion, but cameras in general are able to scape the "swiss army knife" effect because they are content production devices. Same for most audio or graphical design or computer aided engineering hardware(medical devices could also count, but there are other factor which make them a completely different monster). That is including hardware targeted at people that are not very tech-savy, including lots of professionals. You buy it once (plus a few accessories if you wish), its optimized for what you want it to do and you get a quality that is beyond what any all in one general purpose device can give you. And on top of that there is the commercial money making potential using the content you created.
On the other hand there are content consumption devices like e-readers, game consoles, video streaming boxes, portable media players, etc, that may or may not be worth of the price for a variety of factors such as built quality or content availability, are built upon almost entirely on proprietary technologies. If you want to make good use of it you must keep feeding it money for more content. Keeping all these features integrated in one single device and as cheap as possible is important to make the costumer buy more of your content. When these devices have cameras or other sensors, there are nothing but tools to help you consume content.

The problem is that it doesn't really make a lot of sense to create a linux native client yet because most content creation tools are also windows/mac only(not counting wine/darling workarounds), specially considering the fact most of these game engines for indies depend a lot on user created content. Big "Pro" graphical design apps like Adobe CS or Maya have no signs of getting linux ports, less popular and cheaper Sai or Lightwave have no signs either and all FOSS apps have versions for all OSes. Sure for debugging that would be great, it might be still a bit too early for that. Lets take one step at a time.

Are those children programing? Doing graphical design or CAD? Making professional music or videos? Writing professional documents or academic papers? Playing or modding high-end games? No? Then their "proficiency" with the OS is meaningless.

I'm sorry but I couldn't see native code in any of these. Maybe for apps that use deals with small amount of text input, simple graphics, no peripheral hardware interfacing, have no intensive background processing and are running on very good cpus then that is okay. But for anything serious, just no.
Plus all these things are designed for webapps that run in a browser. Qt is for desktop apps. Comparing them is just stupid.