But only a little bit - they are still sold for $200-$300 so you are selecting users who are likely to go out and buy games.
If you gave away XBox/PS3 for free the vast majority of users would just use them fro playing dvd/blueray or browsing - not enough people would buy ninja-killer-car-stealer-gold edition for $60 to pay them back.
The most obvious difference is that most video game consoles can't play a huge corpus of out-of-copyright games that are generally of a higher quality than current titles.
Initially video game consoles are subsidized, over time amortization of development costs, decreasing wholesale prices, incremental redesigns to reduce costs, etc. bring the costs down to where they are not subsidized.
Nintendo has never subsidized hardware sales, they have always made a profit on their consoles and hand-helds. The XBox 360 console is now turning a slight profit on hardware alone due to cost reductions over time (though the Kinect is subsidized). I don't know about the costs of the PS3 but it's certainly far less subsidized than it was at launch.
Not in the sense that cell phones are. If you're MS or Sony, you sell your consoles at cost or for a slight loss, then recoup costs on software sales. By definition, the consoles are loss leaders.
