I picked up an XSX recently. It has a few things going for it. Game pass. Quick resume, IMO is fantastic and I don't think Sony has an answer to. Basically it will save state (no reloading though) or snapshot a game so you can easily swap between multiple titles and be exactly where you were. For offline games it's amazing. Then of course there's backwards compatibility. Pretty awesome that stuff like Timesplitters 2, DoA Ultimate, Morrowind, CoD Black Ops etc. still work and are often boosted in res, better framerates.
There's a few other little things. I use it as a media center player. I like that it has an IR receiver and it works really well with my universal remote and it also plays CDs.
I didn't like the DS4 and the DualSense seems like more gimmicks mixed with an even bigger design. The touchpad is so pointless (and guzzles batteries) with how its placed that I'm mystified why they kept it. The Steam Deck does trackpads in an actually genuinely good way that are useful that it actually felt like an improvement on controller design for the first time in 20 years. So hopefully Sony is taking notes. Better rumble is IMO not worth making controllers even more expensive. One benefit of Xbox's more traditional design is that they are cheap. Regularly on sale for $50 CAD, never seen a DualSense less than $70.
This is probably one of those things where we all have different needs and wants. I was hopeful to read over your post and get some more reasons to buy an Xbox, but none of those worked for me.
GamePass is the huge draw that most people talk about with Xbox. Because I was out of gaming for a few years, my wishlist has games from 10 years ago on it. I wait for a game on my wishlist to hit 75% and then buy (unless there's a game I'm
really excited about, or if I want to support the developers). I can play for about an hour per night, on average; a game like
Horizon: Zero Dawn took me three months to complete. I complete 4-6 games per year, depending on which games I'm choosing. I estimate that if I didn't buy any more games, the current games I've already purchased on sale will take me 3-5 years to complete. In other words, a subscription service like GamePass makes no sense for me: I'd be spending more money on it than I do buying steeply discounted games, and I'd feel pressured to keep up to "get my money's worth" (one of the downsides of having anything on a subscription service).
The media center thing is neat, but gaming consoles lost the media center battle a while ago. Apple may be fumbling the Apple TV a bit, but they have other hardware and service capabilities that make it much more compelling as a media center. I don't think I own CDs anymore...
The Dualsense has a lot of potential, but in some ways it comes off more as a gimmick. The adaptive triggers are probably the coolest feature that does contribute a bit to in-game immersion. The rumble feature felt amazing the first time I experienced it in
Astro's Playroom but I haven't encountered other games that utilized it well. As for battery life, I recently had a day where I gamed for six hours (out sick and no kids with me - haven't pulled off a gaming streak like that in close to 20 years). The battery showed one more bar of power when I decided that was enough and I had other things to do. I haven't forgotten being in my teens and gaming literally all day; I could imagine how the battery life would be irritating in that situation. Doesn't seem too terrible overall, though.
