You seem to be one of the most concerned person on the neogaf forum. It's cool to hate Microsoft. I get it. I am going to play d4 then hit up destiny. Which suprisingly is 1080p and looks exactly like the ps4 version. Go figure.
LOL, why're you so mad, bro!?
China is a wildcard right now because we don't know exactly how an official console launch is going to play out. There are people obviously hedging their bets already in this thread, but me, I'm just gonna wait and see.
We know there's a market due to the presence of the grey imports in basically every major city, despite basically everybody gaming on PCs due to lack of consoles in the country. We know it's priced out of many people's buying power yet there are so many people in China that it may be successful just selling to a small niche, at least at first. For Sales-Age GAF, it'll be very interesting to see how sales fare, and how PS4 may eventually sell in comparison...
Personally, I think consoles in general will sell, not to the average consumer, but also not exclusively to the fabulously rich either. There's a segment of the upper middle class and up who, you know, buy things to enjoy them as much as to potentially show them off. I think the mistake of saying rich people buy things as status symbols is that you assume that's the only things people with lots of disposable income ever buy. What about that large flat panel TV in their home? Does it show off their wealth? Yes, even though they can't take it with them. But they also enjoy content on it once in a while! Consoles could be seen as a trendy, new thing accompanying the TV in that respect.
Going back on the success of the iPhone though, you only need the more well-off who can easily afford it to latch on for it to reach a level of aspirational desirability that gets the rest of the middle class on board. That can take some time and depend on how well it does initially, so we'll have to see about it. Of course, iPhone had a much easier time because the middle class actually likes to flaunt themselves as much as the wealthy. That, I think, is the wildcard in play.