A lot of it is lazy programming though. Look how far people managed to push the Amiga at the end of its life, and also the same was true for both the first Playstation and the PS2. The games at the end of both systems mainstream lives looked like they were running on hardware far different to the first games released for the systems.

With the Xbox 360 I think a lot of developers have been guilty of porting PC games poorly because they can utilise the same code and resources, without really writing at the hardware level or optimising for the hardware. And imagine if coders really explored and pushed PC hardware at any fixed point in time. With the PC new hardware is constantly being released, with faster CPUs, more ram, more powerful GPUs, so the coders just move the goal to the more powerful hardware to more easily achieve their goals, rather than optimising their code and really pushing the existing hardware.

But I think this is true for most things in life, not just coding. People will always opt for the easy way, rather than work hard to do things the right way.
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