I'm not going to lie, you're doing a pretty good job convincing me to re-evaluate my stance on the Saturn atm lol. You almost remind me of myself when that gen was currently ongoing.
I guess what I'm trying to convey is that the most powerful console in the eyes of the consumers (which I think makes sense to use as the metric when arguing sales of the console) is dependant on the visuals and audio that the console puts out. On these terms the Saturn was demonstrably less capable than the Playstation was. The difference in situations between the Saturn and the PS3 is that the best looking PS3 games look better than the best looking 360 games. The best looking Saturn games however didn't even begin to approach the best looking PS1 games. There are PS1 games from second and third tier studios that are better graphically than any individual Saturn game. Now if the console had been more successful, and had the world's best talent focused on producing the best content they could for the machine, than things may have been different. As it stands however, any performance advantages outside of the realm of 2D for the Saturn is theoretical, and was not once actually demonstrated in any released software. The fact that the machine wheezed if you simply asked it to draw any transparencies is enough for me to hand this one over to the Playstation.
With that said however, I wouldn't compare the Xbox One's situation with the Saturn's at all. There was such a crazy amount of things going wrong at the same time for Sega, that I don't think the situation is comparable at all. Being $100 more expensive, whilst getting smacked around in graphics is not a good look though. They should drop to $400 with the Kinect left in at the earliest possibility, and just eat the losses in my opinion. Leaving things as they are will cause the situation to become unrepairable within a year or so.