Xbox360 might not be the most important console out of ALL consoles, but I think it's the most important _modern_ console. Online gaming, online store, an indie game channel with XNA (which itself was revolutionary, even though some of its importance might be forgotten today), HD support. A lot of things it got right back when these were all brand new on a console. Plus it had geometry wars.
It was the first system of a modern design in a lot of ways.
Six hardware threads, so the thread per subsystem model didn't really work. Instead you got the best results from a DAG of tasks submitted to a job stealing scheduler running on most of the CPU resources. But beside that, no little DSPs that you had to separate work out onto other than the GPU.
And it had the first consumer GPU to incorporate unified shaders (so vertex and pixel shaders ran on the same cores, dynamically scheduled to improve utilization).
The 360’s GPU was very modern, but I’m hesitant to give the 360 the “modern design” label because of how esoteric those CPU cores were; And the major hoops developers needed to jump through to get them preforming at peak performance, along with offloading work to the GPU.
They had SMT, but unlike every other implementation of SMT I’m aware of, memory stalls on one thread would stall both threads… which kind of defeats the primary purpose of SMT.
At least with the PS3’s Cell, the SPUs were designed to be esoteric on purpose. It seems like Xenon kind of just ended up being esoteric by accident. (Or maybe they ended up like that because Microsoft were cheating off Sony’s homework)
Geometry wars was very fun. I played on PC always trying to top my friends high scores.