While PC games aren’t unplayable without patching anymore, they will almost all need to be patched for something at some point.
This is not the case with 99% of console games.
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As is the case with the overwhelming majority of PC games. I ask again, what PC games require release-day patching?
But many PC game patches provide additional functionality at no extra cost. Valve, makes of Half-Life, provided a masterclass in community support through patching, with TFC, DM Classic, free maps etc. Additional functionality provided by console manufacturers is often charged for. It cost ~£10 for four extra maps for COD:4, for instance, on the XBox 360.
Patches and extra content are not the same thing and it’s a shame they’ve been conflated by a lot of people.
Most get patched for problems on a few machines, sure, but most patches add content and balance the game. Surely not a bad thing. Blizzard are of course the gold standard. They patch their games a lot, but their games are quite runnable on launch day.
Blame companies releasing things they call “patches” which do very little but add content 
All the examples I mentioned were patches, in that they were bug fixes for various problems. The fact that they also threw in whole new games, mods, levels etc. is surely irrelevant as to whether they should be rightfully called patches, no?
Where do you see convergence? (The processors are more custom today than in the past so I assume you are referring to some other aspect)
The PS3 and Xbox 360 use what are essentially PC GPUs. Something around the ATI x1800 gen for the Xbox and the geforce 7800 gen for the PS3. They use standard PC ram or graphics ram types for memory, PC-like motherboard architecture, etc.
I get the impression that it’s not hard to port x86 code to the XBox’s PowerPC but that it’s quite a pain in the ass for PS3s, which is why you see more ports between PC and the Xbox 360. Certainly this generation of consoles is closer to being pure PC hardware than any previous gen.
Well, it’s not like you’re porting x86 assembly to PPC assembly. That would be hard. Both Windows games and XBox games are designed under a set of Microsoft-developed APIs, so, for the most part, the actual engine of the game can be ported with no extra work at all, because Microsoft’s compiler can take care of it. There’s still work to be done on some other parts, but the game part of the game doesn’t need to be rewritten.
The PS3, on the other hand uses a completely different API, developed by Sony. I’ve heard that it is notoriously hard to code for, due to some architectural quirks of the Cell processor, but I don’t know much about it.
“While PC games aren’t unplayable without patching anymore, they will almost all need to be patched for something at some point.”
The games in the comparison were the same however, with only the platform being different.
So that argument doesnt explain the disparities found for those particular games.
Otara