It's not really fair to compare PC and console games. The target audiences are typically very different, not to mention the hardware capabilities (both things like graphics and sound, but also things like input devices) are very disparate. I have friends that are hardcore PC gamers but have never touched a console in their life, and other friends that won't play PC games at all but live on their Playstations. Maybe the line is blurring more now, but, especially when many of these "classic" games were coming out, they were two different worlds.
As an example, I remember about two years ago I was browsing around on...GameFAQS I think? Or possibly GameSpot...reading reviews of some of my favorite games. Whichever it was listed the console version of WCIV separately from the PC version. The reviews for the PC version were (almost entirely) amazingly favorable (duh! I could make a pretty good argument that it is the best of the Wing Commander games), while the reviews for the console version were horrible, by and large. Now I never played the console version of WCIV, but unless it was somehow vastly inferior to the PC version, the only explanations I can come up with is that (1) the game doesn't lend itself well to a console-type controller instead of a joystick (I doubt this), or (2) console enthusiasts enjoy very different types of games than PC gamers (many of the negative reviews claimed that WCIV compared poorly to "other" first and third person shooter games...despite the fact that I would not consider WCIV a "shooter" game, as I've alluded in other threads).
