You already answered your own question. With the extended amount of time that the PS3 and XBOX 360 have been the top of the line the underlying hardware and technology has stayed the same so developers have a much longer time period to exploit the hardware and software to it's fullest.
For example, the XBOX is running a version of DirectX 9 (we are on DirectX 11 now, 11.1 around the corner). It was released in 2002 so it's not like it was something new that no one had used before. Over time developers knew that it would hardly change at all on the 360 so any and every refinement carried over in each title.
So console titles now, bar 3D and other minor updates, are what they could and arguably should have been on release. Maybe less so on the PS3 as their development kits are extremely expensive and were hard to get. It's just now all that is old news, consoles lack technologies that make modern games look so good.
I have owned the major consoles bar the PS3 but I have used a number of them.
It comes down to the same thing as iPhone fags telling me how great a 8MP camera is, or video calls or whatever. Welcome to a decade ago shit cunts.