Sure, but we're still talking about customized SoCs, with some additional silicon in there for extra audio and video DSPs. Also I'd bet that even on modern arch

Sure, but we're still talking about customized SoCs, with some additional silicon in there for extra audio and video DSPs. Also I'd bet that even on modern architectures most console games (or their base libraries) still require precise timing on the side of memory access, CPU stalls, instruction cycles, available bandwidth, etc. Once you start requiring per-cycle emulation of any of those components we lose any advantages from having any kind of paravirtualization elsewhere.