Ok, I might be going against the general opinion here, but in my opinion playstations have always been a pretty good deal (better than both Xboxes and Pcs)
I'll use the PS3 as an example, since the PS4 isn't out yet.
When the PS3 came out, people ridiculed it for its high price. But here is the thing, at launch, it was 399$ (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_launch)
If you take good care of your playstation, it could last you the whole generation. It launched early in 2006. Its successor is launching later this year, in 2013. That's a 7 year life span.
Hardware wise, the total cost of ownership came down to 16 cents a day. (399$/(7 years * 365 days))
To build a comparable PC back in 2006, you needed to spend a LOT more, to get a comparable CPU and graphics card would cost you 1000$, so the PC would probably cost you 1500$ - 2000$. After all, the PS3 played Crysis, and had a Blu-ray drive. Plus, your 2006 PC probably can't play any new games that came out after 2010. So you would either need to spend a significant amount of money upgrading (not really possible, since the CPU sockets changed), or buy a new one.
According to my math, the TCO of my PC comes down to nearly 2$ a day! Much, much higher than a playstation. Now some people might say that they need a PC for daily use anyways, but than, a good gaming PC would cost you a LOT, whereas you can get a good daily use pc for under 500$. Plus, I already have a laptop, and the only reason I have a desktop is for gaming.
Now the TCO for an xbox is also much, much higher than for playstation. Since after all, on an xbox, in order to do pretty much anything, you need xbox live gold. And that is 60$/year.
Mind you, I love my pc, and I do have a stupidly overpowered PC for high level gaming and programming, but I'm not going to lie, console gaming is, rationally, the cheaper choice.
Now, every console has its exclusive titles, and to be honest, I think, besides PC, playstion has the best exclusives. Compared to xbox 360, the ps3 pretty much got a new exclusive every month, and the exclusives library is very good. In fact, pretty much everything out of japan runs only on playstation.
PS (no pun intended), if you own a playstation, you need to get PS+ (
http://us.playstation.com/psn/playstation-plus/), it is arguably one of the best deals in gaming right now.