Remember when the Wii was announced and people raged about the motion control gimmick only to have Sony, in the eleventh hour, toss in the whole SIXAXIS thing for the PS3, to which the nerds received it as "And now Playstation has motion control too so the Wii is just that much stupider!!"
Feels like history repeating with the Wii U's screenmote and now the PS4 having a kind of half-assed screen addition to their controller that is safe and hedging its bets like the sixaxis did.
The difference, though, is that I think Sony might actually be right this time, but somewhat unintentionally. With the Wii, you needed a wand + nun-chuk configuration to make motion controls really make sense, particularly for pointing(which was arguably the marquee 'motion' control of the Wii anyway), but in the case of having a display built into the controller, the Wii U winds up in this weird spot with how big the controller is as well as the whole screen sharing thing where it ends up becoming your primary focus in a weird way. Meanwhile, having a small Vita-esque screen on a controller like the PS4 can still provide a bunch of the novelty usage (item switching, mini maps whatever) but the focus is still firmly on what is happening on the TV.
But yes, Sony might really be onto something with the whole game streaming and sharing concept. It's obviously contingent on bandwidth and whatever but assuming it works smoothly, that has a ton of potential. My interest in gaming has waned over the years but all of my friends who are still into it recreationally watch game streams live or recorded, it's become a pretty huge area of interest for 'gamers' and all it will take is PS4 to get a few 'competitive' titles or mario-esque challenge titles and I think people will really like that sharing stuff.
As to Sony not showing the console itself, I mean, Nintendo didn't really show the Wii U console either when they debuted it and I think it's fair to say that it's kind of become a little irrelevant by now. The PS3 was one of the biggest and clumsiest systems to date and it still sold well and people were fine with it in their rooms, similar with the Xbox 360, and while I personally think consoles should be as minimal and low footprint as possible, the realities of getting this much performance out of them just doesn't work with that, so for Sony it's just probably not that big of a deal, and I think realistically, they're probably right, most 'gamers' really don't care about that sort of thing.
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