Note that in some ways, more modern consoles may actually be easier (or at least have different problems) - there are a whole bunch of abstraction layers that stop programmers from doing weird cycle-accurate tricks, and they don't have the development time for it anyway.
Modern may be "easier" because they are being built on top of hardware that is similar to what is found in modern consumer pc systems. That's no to say they are nessessarily the same but being x86 based means they have many of the same instruction sets.