> "Developers are going to have a great time this generation thanks to how similar the hardware is (identical in many cases)."
Sure the hardware will be similar, but what use is that if the APIs to access the hardware are totally different? I think the odds of Sony using DirectX in their SDK are pretty slim.
Developers had been writing multi-platform code for 10 years already. When you have API calls isolated from the rest of the code it takes a couple man/months tops to target another API.
The hard part of the previous generations multi-platform had been in getting to the same level of performance. E.g. 360 had a pretty weak CPU and a superior GPU compared to PS3 so the distribution of things done on CPU and GPU was completely different between these two targets.
Sure the hardware will be similar, but what use is that if the APIs to access the hardware are totally different? I think the odds of Sony using DirectX in their SDK are pretty slim.