I touched on this in my last post, but I figured it was worth a full one. Also note that I have no actual experience with homebrew on any console but the Wii, so everything else is just hearsay.
Anyways, one of the reasons that an Xbox 360 can play, say, Fallout 3, while my computer, which actually has somewhat better stats all-around (except perhaps the GPU, which is rather difficult to measure exactly) cannot is optimization. Optimization is the idea that if one has a standardized set of hardware, one can squeeze far more power and stability out of it than if you had a lot of different and often customized sets of hardware of roughly equal power. Thus, one is either required to have hardware that in actuality can do a lot more than it ever does, but cannot because nobody ever writes programs specifically for that device, or you can have a lot of identical or nearly-identical units with code written specifically for that machine.
Unfortunately (or rather fortunately, for other reasons which somewhat override this complaint) the PC market is a free-for-all, with many different vendors selling many constantly-changing computer models. Also, the PC gaming crowd tends to make their own machines or upgrade existing ones, making machine-specific software utterly impossible. Again, this is a good thing for many reasons, but optimization is not one of them.
Home consoles are the other end of the spectrum. Every single one of them is exactly the same, barring minor changes such as the recent model of Xbox 360 or a certain hidden change to the Wii that I'll get back to later. Unfortunately, they are also closed platforms - not only do you have to pay money for the privilege of developing software for them (which must then be approved by the vendor) but from what I hear you also have to know the right people.
Thus, homebrew. Unauthorized software made by home users in order to capitalize on optimization. Security vulnerabilities are discovered in the operating systems of the consoles in question, which are then widened by software such as The Homebrew Channel, much as a small crack widens in an asphalt road. Predictably, the legal status is somewhat hazy.
Vendors do not like this. Not at all. After all, they paid their programmers good money to lock down what they believe to be their systems. Naturally, the problem must be eradicated. This, not performance or stability, is what drives console makers to update. First, there was The Twilight Hack. Then the original Bannerbomb. Not once has Nintendo added any useful feature or increased either the stability or the performance of the Wii. Later software runs fine on un-updated Wiis, provided it can be made to run without updating the Wii.
Microsoft is just as bad, locking users out of Xbox Live for the crime of using their own hardware. And Sony... if I get going on Sony, you'll be here all day. Long story short, console vendors use updates to trick users into locking down their systems further under the guise of improving them. And not just software updates. You think the only reason Microsoft changed the Xbox 360 was to make it look cooler? A similar thing happened to the Wii, but without all the fanfare. Wiis made after a certain date make a certain, crucial part of the NAND related to booting the Wii non-rewritable. This was because hackers had figured out ways to overwrite it with software that made it possible to fix the Wii should the rest of the NAND be corrupted somehow. In other words, Nintendo intentionally made the Wii less stable, not more.(Did I mention that Nintendo's own updates can sometimes be the source of said corruption?)
Yes, the ability to run unauthorized code can and does sometimes lead to piracy. And that sucks. That said, the major Wii hacking sites have a ban on any software that could be used to pirate official Wii games. the idea isn't to pirate, it's to take advantage of the wonderful hardware that the user paid for with their own money.
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