What consoles were you using? The closest thing to PC hardware were the Xbox's, which was intentional. The Playstations used MIPS-based setups with tricks like scratchpad while PS3 had Cell processor. Had it been boring and PC-like, then porting to PS3 would've been a breeze.
TI-83 - embarassingly bad hardware for the year 2000+, but everyone had one and you got to learn z80 assembly. Very similar to programming for 80's home computers.
Gameboy Advance - really nice open source toolchain, fun hardware (classic framebufferless sprite / tile graphics, but very powerful), and being somewhat inexpensive and portable (this is long before the iPhone).
Nintendo DS - by far my favorite system, it keeps the great toolchain of the GBA and still has the fun graphics hardware. Flash cartridges for this were cheap and plentiful, making development super easy. It also had primitive but very easy to use 3D graphics to combine with the traditional GBA hardware. It also had a touchscreen (when resistive was still cool), a wavetable synthesizer, wifi, and all sorts of other goodies to play with.
Wii - the last system I thought was interesting before I stopped messing with consoles. It was still very PC like but had the neat controllers, was cheap, and had weird fixed function graphics inherited from the Gamecube.
Well, sure, odd and limited systems can certainly be fun to learn and bring to a usable state. You can play the same game with the PC hardware: it's called the demo scene (e.g. kkkrieger). Usually a different game with that kind of power, though. The game is to do the coolest stuff you can with the hardware. You might squeeze out extra performance, modify the software architecture, leverage components in creative ways, and so on.
You should've had a lot of fun with Cell processor if you like hackery. It blended several different models into one interesting piece of hardware that could be tweaked into emulating them all and doing some side-by-side. More interesting (and useful!) than any of the above systems. That's why supercomputer people put a cluster of them to good use. :)
