... shouldnt the PCs be able to handle console ports easily at the highest detail???
Have you played Skyrim then ?
Have you seen the differences ?
Skyrim on consoles runs with very low-res textures. It has too, as the xbox and ps3 have only 512MB ram. Just look at screenshot at 1080p resolution. The difference is huge. You might not notice it when you look at 600x400 screenshots, because there is a lot less detail to be seen in small screenshots anyway. Normal textures (high settings) on the PC were already a lot better than xbox textures. But now PC-users even got a high-res DLC texture pack. And that makes the difference even bigger.
Consoles do have Anti-Aliasing, but not for every game. And the AA-methods used might be less effective or more blurry than AA-methods you can select on a PC. Can consoles do transparency AA ?
Games on consoles are rendered in lower resolution. Skyrim on xbox and ps3 render in 720p. It is your TV's responsibility to upscale them. The difference between 1028x720 and 1920x1200 is 2.5x more pixels.
The more render-power you have on a PC, the more eyecandy you can enable. I wasn't able to play any games without 4xAA. I just bought a gtx680 a few weeks ago. I enabled SSAO to check it out. Now I already can not live without SSAO.
What makes you believe draw-distance on consoles and PCs is the same ? You can see a lot further on a PC. And then there is all these hidden eye-candy in the ini files. Self-shadow on trees and rocks. Render more cells in detail, etc. None of these option can be enabled on a console. And if you could, it would bring the consoles to their knees (first reason: lack of ram).
Console users seem to have no problem with a game that runs at 30 fps at all times. Maybe because when they use a joypad they can't move their cameras quickly ? Maybe because the screen is already a lot more blurry, they don't notice ?
So yes, consoles might be able to make more efficient use of their hardware. But even if this doubles their rendering-power, they are still far behind the rendering-power of modern PCs. PCs don't use that extra power to get 200+ framerates. They use it to enable more eyecandy.
Rendering at 1080p, using high-res textures, using better AA and transparency AA, using SSAO, what do you think the resulting fps for consoles will be ? If consoles want the same rendering-power as modern PCs, they need similar hardware. And the costs will be similar. I think the new generation consoles will not match up with my gtx680. And then the gap will only become bigger again.