One word: DirectX.
DirectX came about in an age where every computer had a graphics chip (or two or more for 2D and 3D) and each of those graphics chips had, pretty much, their own API. In addition to that, PC gaming was growing rapidly. The problem with having 10,000 different customers with 10,001 different hardware configurations was the fact that every developer had to program their game from the ground up. So developers were spending huge amounts of time and resources in developing for Glide, OpenGL and other APIs, just for one game. Most older games would present you a choice at the very beginning (or had separate executables!): Glide, OpenGL, or whatever, and you'd then start playing a version of the game you wanted to play that used one of those APIs as a render-path.
DirectX sought to unify all of this, and it did so in a great way, at the start. Suddenly, 98% of all PC owners (and pretty much 100% of all PC gamers) had DirectX, and the GPU manufacturers just had to make drivers that translated the Direct X calls into calls that can be understood by their cards. Developers were happy and PC gaming took off.
Fast forward to about 2005, about the time when the Xbox 360 and PS3 came out. Suddenly the game development landscape looked entirely different: There are now only two major players in the GPU market and video games as a whole have become so complex that most dev studios couldn't afford to develop their engines from scratch, so the licensing of engines became common practice. This has the major advantage that games will be cross-platform almost instantly if you license an engine that's already been ported (Unreal Engine is one of the more common cross-platform engines).
Suddenly, the burden of development lies mostly with content creation and mechanics, and less with nuts-and-bolts technical issues, hence the recent explosion of Indie developers. That's all fine and well, but this whole time, DirectX hasn't really changed apart from the fact that it's gotten 100x more features and maybe a little more efficient. Engines developed for consoles continued to see major strides in what they could achieve on limited hardware, while the PC was largely stuck with the inefficiencies of DirectX. That's also all fine and well, but the new consoles are out, they share the exact same hardware as PCs, yet they've got so much more potential. Why? Because PCs still rely on DirectX.
DirectX is still acting like there's dozens of different GPUs out there from dozens of different manufacturers and presents a lot of processing overhead to try and provide a hardware abstraction layer between game and metal. Such a thing is unnecessary with a console, since the hardware never changes, developers can access the hardware almost directly without having to go through layers of software to do it. On the PC, hardware variations are also becoming more and more irrelevant. CPUs are more or less compatible with one another, there are only two major GPU vendors, audio has been standardized and abstracted to the point of irrelevance, the same with input.
The only wildcard is graphics, and with AMD's Mantle coming out, we're going to enter a second Golden Age of PC Gaming, where middle-of-the-road hardware will be able to achieve things only high-end hardware running under DirectX can dream of.
I think that, in the future, PC gaming will really begin to shine and all the benefits of having all that faster hardware will finally come to fruition.
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