I largely agree with this.
I honestly think a lot of the furor this time though is that the consoles are launching head to head in the same timeframe and some members of the media/enthusiast press seem to be trying to hard to either downplay any differences or appear impartial which in some instances actually does readers a disservice. There was a pretty decent time gap between the launch of the 360 and PS3 which in hindsight makes a lot of the issues and price with the PS3 even more laughable. Here they're launching head to head, so outside of the console warriors who have made decisions either way people are looking for potential purchasing decisions and seeing some people/outlets gloss over what are some pretty objective performance issues and differences.
Couple that with Microsoft having unbelievably terrible messaging and multiple reverals on VERY unpopular policies (DRM, Kinect, etc) there's an audience already out for blood. So that's certainly part of it, but I do feel that certain people in the press are definitely underplaying things, intentionally or not. I feel it's a bit premature to start aggressively calling out most outlets though until both systems are actually out and we have direct head to head comparisons of multiple games on both platforms. If at launch direct comparisons between versions show clear and noticeable differences and there is little or no difference in the review scores between the versions and/or outlets start/continue to downlplay that then I think people will have a legitimate axe to grind.
I think certain people are just being given too much attention at the moment since everyone's in full on console launch mode and grasping at everything out there. Most of the individuals being called out for playing favorites or being fanboys on either side were almost all people I largely ignored already beforehand, so I'm seeing a trend there.
