A long time ago, there was a big difference between PC and console gaming. The former often came with headaches. You’d fight with drivers, struggle with crashes, and grow ever more frustrated dealing with CD piracy checks and endless patches and updates. Meanwhile, consoles offered the exact opposite experience—just slam in a cartridge, and go!
That beautiful feature fell away when consoles joined the Internet. Suddenly there were servers to sign in to and updates to download and a whole bunch of hoops to jump through before you even got to play a game. Now, those early generations of Internet-connected consoles are becoming retro, and that’s introduced a whole new set of problems now the infrastructure is dying or dead. Boot up and play? You must be joking!
Ooh, a 486-66. Yeah, you’ll be playing a ton of 3D games on that… I owned a Pentium 60 back when — yes, even one of the ones with the floating point division bug — and it could play Doom very nicely but couldn’t quite hack it for Quake and without some manner of hardware acceleration it was absolutely inadequate for any of the PS1 game ports that came out shortly thereafter.
The crux of it is that I think you’re doing quite a bit of conflation here between the PC (i.e. the Intel x86 compatible platform) and home computers, which indeed historically used all kinds of different architectures. Yes, the MSX and Commodores and Amiga and Sharp X68000 and all the rest of them were things that existed, and I find all of those equally interesting as old consoles because by and large they were all doing their own things and were not just yet another PC clone.
The Playstation beginning from the 4 on upwards and the XBox since its inception (literally “Direct X Box” initially) meanwhile are just low-rent x86 PCs. Using parts and hardware anyone could buy and put togther, if they felt like it. To each their own, but I don’t see any appeal there at all.
And for the record: Yes, I am well aware that the oodles of 8 bit home micros from the '80s and so forth had various joysticks and gamepads. I owned several and I still have a few of them. As far as game input goes, of them are without exception absolute crap compared to a simple NES pad.