I think the general public can be best summed up by the amount of sales the FIFA series gets, slight tweaks every year and it sells by the bucketload whilst people pass over far better games.
Similar with Simpsons games - the only good Simpsons game was the side scrolling beat em up at the arcades years ago - since then there has been a plethora of cash-ins - and they all still sell despite being rip off of other ideas (skate boarding, wrestling, kart racing). Similar could be said of the Star Wars franchise though that has given us some good amongst the bad.
Unfortunately the casual gamer buys what gets the marketing, the hype and what appears to be cool. Considering the amount of lacklustre games on PS2 the sales figures are shocking, there are so few must-have games.
I hope that when XB Live comes along it will be advertised and people will see there is a maching capable of great online gaming with stacks of power and lots of good games - whereas the PS2 owners will have to fork out for add-ons and still wont be playing games at the same standard.
Dreamcast was one of my favourite consoles - so many great games, Shenmue, Virtua Tennis, Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur to name but a few - there is no justice in the gaming world else it would not have failed, although Sega's hardware choices in the past led to failures it was the hype of the PS2 and its 'ooooooh emotion engine' that stopped people buying a DC - people were lead to believe PS2 was going to be the most amazing thing ever to happen to gaming - the hype was unreal - built in DVD, connectability to other devices such as digital cameras, ability to download films via broadband to an HDD and the emotion engine which was meant to change our lives and the way we play games - but no one ever mentions any more!
PS2 is certainly not bad (though i lent mine to my girlfriends family about 4 months ago and really havent missed it) its just not as good as it was meant to be - almost all the good games are just sequels.
Mega Drive was not huge in Japan, Saturn had a very good following though - there are loads of great games that never made it as far as Europe.
I think its pretty sad people hating MS - they have done a lot to make the XB the best console ever - DD5.1 in game sound, HDD even making cables that stop you tripping over them and hurling the console to the ground. It's not like MS cuts down rainforests or funds animal testing, if people had something aganist huge companies with rich owners then they wouldnt buy from Sony - they have record companies, film companies and all sorts of electrical stuff.