MMO's for PC's tend to have the ability to be more sophisticated - the amount of inputs available for WoW are insane (from what i've observed) - but if you take EVE (i play this) you couldnt get this to work properly on a console... there arnt enough buttons on a typical control pad.
You could say that about any PC game, but if you're talking about interface alone, I find it hard to find much merit to that.
You have to first know that most people playing any game for any platform aren't very good at them, the majority of gamers fall firmly into the low skill / casual demographic.
In terms of an MMO like WoW in which you have your 500 abilities. However most of it's playerbase use the default UI and control almost everything from clicking about that UI with their mouse. That isn't very sophisticated nor a particularly demanding role for a gamepad to fill. For those not only desperate enough to be playing WoW on a console instead of a PC but also desperate enough to want their 30+ key binds I'm sure will happily take care of themselves in the KB+M dept.
Onto MMO's being the saving grace of PCs? well sure, WoW does indeed bring massive amounts of revenue into 'team PC' ... but Blizzard aren't exactly spending it on the PC as a gaming platform are they? sure they're developing multiple, highly anticipated PC games... but every platform have developers making those up and coming 'must have' games for them, funnily enough that's what developers strive to do.
Unlike consoles who have their multi-gagillionaire backers who go out their way to make sure their platform is viewed #1 for gaming by the button mashing masses, ensuring that an idiot can throw their disc in and be sitting in the middle of a noob tossing flame war before they know it. PCs do not.
Sure, PCs have their people making the games, their people making the new fancy graphics cards, their few providers letting you get the games digitally, their spectacular modding scene. But none of them have stepped forward to eliminate the one true coup de grâce consoles have over that giant word processor. Ease of use.
However sophisticated and knowledgeable about PCs we in OcUK land think we are, almost nobody using them can claim this... infact merely installing a PC game for some can be an ordeal which leaves them on hotlines to tech support or just giving up entirely... not to mention having to make sure you have the latest DirectX distributable, drivers for your graphics cards, motherboards, sound devices updated and configured.
When they get the game installed? do you really think they can tell a shader version from a anisotropic filterinator? those ingame options may as well be chinese and if they weren't detected properly then they aren't going to have the best experience possible for their PC... and heaven forbid there might be a patch they have to go trawling through the internet for or some vague .cfg tweak they need to perform.
My own brother had CoD4 for several months before declaring "it's crap, can never find any decent servers to play on" ... to my horror on inspecting his PC one evening spent around his place to see he not only was playing it in 1024x768 on a widescreen monitor but hadn't patched it at all.
As an avid PC elitist so and so, this is pretty disheartening, I love my platform, I love what it can do and what I can do with it. But the real people with any power over it's direction, the developers, publishers, hardware manufacturers and OS bestowers aren't exactly making it easy for me to stand my ground when someone needs a PhD in tinkering with windows to get a game setup properly. They are all happily throwing their assorted products into an intimidating and very confusing cloud of undiscovered installations and menus of gibberish and hoping somewhere from that falls a happy gamer.
So what PC games now usually have atleast something informing you a patch is available as standard? and who cares digital distributors like Steam or Impulse have their snazzy automatic updates without much fuss?... it just isn't coming close to the ease of use of a console.
PCs will not die as a platform. Well maybe if some unforeseen global catastrophe occurs, but we can't exactly blame that on the pirates can we? But for them to remain a realistic choice for developers to flagship their titles upon, raw horsepower just won't be enough anymore.
