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Revolution Easy To Port To
Despite suggestions that the Revolution will not be as powerful as the other next-gen systems, 1up is reporting the system will be easy to port games to. From the article: "It's easy to see Nintendo's logic, though. Even though Revolution won't have the same memory bandwidth as Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the familiarity with current generation development and tools that Revolution takes advantage of means most companies shouldn't have much trouble working Revolution into the mix."
This is true, but the fact that it's easy to port games to the Revolution doesn't mean it'll have better games like the PS2 did, it just ensures that it'll have the same games, or at least most of the same games. Unless developers FOCUS their game-making on the Revolution, it'll be stuck with ports of games made primarily for the other platforms, which will make it equal to the others at the very most. Not better. You do have a point about the pricing, but my personal viewpoint is that unless I'm getting somethin a LOT better, I'm going to stick with my PC and PS2. I'd rather spend $400 on a huge improvement than $200 on a marginal one. That might be different for other people, of course.
I honestly don't know how much 'weaker' the Revolution will be; the handful of people I know who are game developers are mostly programming peons so they don't have too much information. One of my friends did say he thinks that a lot of people are under a serious misconception about the system because of what Nintendo has released as a 'Pre-Alpha' development kit to certain companies. He claims that Nintendo has released an improved Tri-Force based (for those that don't know, that's the Gamecube's arcade platform that is ~2X as powerful as the Gamecube) development kit that emulates the new features of the Revolution (like per-pixel shading); the purpose of this kit is not to produce something that performs in the same range as the Revolution but is to enable developers to Port/Develop the engine and test new features on a small scale. I'm told that it is not that uncommon for companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony to provide the developers with different hardware inorder to allow them to progress so I think that this sounds reasonable.
The only other thing I have heard from developers is that Nintendo is undercutting their performance on purpose in order to send the message to developers that they're not going to pressure them to produce games which they can not afford to make and to send the message that they want more creative and enjoyable games rather than prettier games.
Now, everything I have been told could have been a pack of lies but none of it sounds unreasonable; the initial development kits for the 360 were just Power Macs (and in a tight NDA agreement several people might be under the impression that this is the final hardware and leak it to news sites), and Nintendo announced that the Gamecube would only produce 12-15 Million Polygons per second (While Microsoft promised 155 Million with the XBox and Sony Promised 66 Million with the PS2; the XBox 360 may approach 40-60 Million and the PS3 may get into the 60-100 Million range but no hardware can sustain 100 Million + Polygons per second in a game situation) so it's not unreasonable to say Nintendo may make claims at the lower end of what is possible on their system.