I might agree with the OP's general premise of being good to your fans, and let's be frank, I don't know enough about Ultima Online since last playing it in like 7th grade and stuff, to gauge the accuracy of how good they've been to their Ultima Online fans.
But EA is right out just as terrible as NCSoft as far as killing franchises and taking dumps all over their fans goes. Maybe they've been all kisses and hugs to their Ultima Online fans, but that's the exception for them then, not the rule.
So I might agree with your ideas there, I highly disagree with your choice of representation of those ideals.
Somehow, no matter how hard they try, I just can't see keyboards and web surfing becoming a console thing. Sure they can have the feature, but will anyone use it? As someone who has tried hooking up a PC to a big screen TV a couple of times, it feels very awkward. It's fine for reading text in video games with fonts and sizes that have been designed with couch potatoing in mind. But trying to read a website? Just, no. My eyes feel like they're bugging out trying to read an article on a screen that is 15 feet away. It's very unnatural.
And keyboards? Imagine trying to play CoH on a console. You can't very well put a mouse on your lap, so you'd need a handheld controller to actually play the game. But then everytime you want to send a message, you'd have to drop the controller and switch to the keyboard. Way, WAY too much trouble.
The difference between console and computer and between television and monitor are more or less over with now as it is, and will only continue to be that way. That's one of the reasons why when people are like "PC gaming is dead because of consoles!" and "Console gaming is dead because of PCs!", they're both 'right' and yet neither are.
As long as people like getting pre-packaged pre-baked hardware to play video games will, 'consoles' will be around, even if the next generation of them is basically just a pre-packaged computer that plugs into a 30+ inch monitor and a restrictive OS.
As for font size, people are gonna realize one day that just because you can make a clear letter the size of a gnat's nads doesn't mean that people can read it. Until then, you can use Control and + or - in most browsers to increase the size of text, and use 'medium' sized icons.
I actually have an easier time reading some things on PC games on a TV than consoles because many PC games have the ability to re size the GUI by 1.1 times or change the resolution or whatever. Something that console games have so far never gotten the hang of.
Console games might be 'designed' for 30 inch televisions 6 feet away from you, but console game designers seem to think we're all eagles that can read a 3 point anti-aliased font from that distance. And there's nothing you can do to change it. It's even worse if you're on a non HDTV, like I was when I first got my X-Box 360. But at least in MOST games on a PC on your TV you can make all that stuff bigger if you need to.
But I can't honestly say there's a
realistic difference between my TV and any monitors I own anymore from a hardware standpoint, especially as I haven't cared about cable TV or over air TV programming for a decade now.
Give me a 3 dollar adapter and I could get even my 'Computer Only' monitors to display crisp television broadcasts anyways. I wouldn't even
need that anymore as a lot of cable boxes now use HDMI.