Why even bring consoles into the equation?People who want consoles play games on consoles.
For the price of 1 macbook you can buy a gaming laptop with just as much performance bank the difference and buy another one in 2 years time at which point you will have had to send the macbook to landfill because there is a new one out and you don't want to look poor.
Because the latest games are on consoles and, like it or not, being better than them is the benchmark for a gaming PC.
I have never owned an iMac or a MacBook, but I have repaired and helped sell many. One obvious thing is just how well they hold their value years later, and yet you chose to dismiss resale value as a point of criticism? You aren't talking to an Apple fan here, so you should be more inclined to believe me when I tell you that you are wrong. In two years it will still be worth hundreds in undamaged functional condition.
Hell, the 2009 iMac my brother and I just refurbished was hundreds with a bad hard drive and people on this forum called that "a steal."
iMacs and MacBooks as PCs (BootCamp) are perfectly good for the vast majority of PC gamers. Performance-wise, they are FAR closer to PC gaming notebooks than they are to your average non-gaming PC (the VAST majority or notebooks). Few would say that you must have the absolute latest gaming PC to play games and even the current MacBook Air is better than gaming PCs from a couple generations ago while being far more portable, efficient, and having far better quality.
For example, my M11x r3 has the exact same display panel part as the older 11.6" MacBook Air and looks unacceptably bad (I suspect that they were bin-sorted for Apple), but the newer MacBooks Airs are a significant upgrade in performance and image quality with much better battery life. Even an old MBA would be an upgrade, so a MBP would be a leap. I need something which can go on the motorcycle with me (tank bag) so I would not consider the upgrade until the smallest MBA leaps far enough. It soon will. My 2011 M11x R3 will not retain nearly the value that a 2011 MBA would have retained.
For a long time now, Macs have been PCs which can run Windows. Can we please bury the hatchet and start comparing them to PCs in other ways than Mac vs. PC? How about "Apple model versus [brand] model?" Sheesh.
Edit: You guys are preaching to the choir. It's stupid that we are still having this discussion when it's practically 2015. We should be evaluating them as limited expansion PCs which can also run OSX.