The problem is that moving to allow indies into consoles means ceding control over AAA publishers. Actually, most people aren't even aware of how much bullshit goes on in the console space because it's all under NDA. I mean, you know how people complain about how Steam is hard to get into because Greenlight sucks? Well people only complain because Valve actually lets them complain. By making Greenlight and admitting that their current submission system sucks they made the problems with getting games onto Steam very visible. When in reality even pre-Greenlight Steam was infinitely more approachable than Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony.
So typically if you want to write games for a Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony platform you have to buy development hardware. Normal devices do not accept development code; nor can they be updated to accept development code ala iOS. You need to buy a devkit. But wait: these devkits aren't actually available to the general public. In fact, they aren't even sold. They're fixed-fee rentals and they do expect the hardware back when you stop development games for the system.
So actually the first thing you do is not buy a devkit or download an SDK, the first thing you do is apply to become a licensed developer. In which case the console manufacturer will ask you for your address, your prior game development experience, and the balance of your bank account. And then they'll tell you that your address is wrong because it's not in commercially zoned secure office space because they don't trust you to keep the SDK a secret. So you get a commercial lease and then they tell you you don't have enough liquid capital reserves and not enough games on your belt. Most people would quit at this point, because commercial leases are already pretty expensive, but let's say you form a corporation, get a commercial lease, and release a bunch of iOS games that get enough sales that your target console manufacturer feels safe in licensing you.
Alright, so now you've addled yourself on iOS or Android game development, which means that you're used to working in, say, Unity if you bought a Pro license, or you use Android's Java or iOS's Objective-C. Or you thought ahead and wrote everything in C++. Fair enough. When you get your shiny new game console SDK, you open it up to see... a whole bunch of random low-level libraries for dealing with something called "gx2" or "gcm" or whatever, a bunch of other random headers... the C++ compiler and, wait a second, who the hell is still using fucking Metroworks?! Where the fuck is OpenGL?! What do you mean Unity/Flash/etc doesn't support this platform!?
Well, no, there is no OpenGL or any graphics API for that matter, it's all some stupid low-level hardware API that you have to tickle to get any 3D rendering to work. And it turns out people still use Metroworks because they were the first to have a working PowerPC compiler, they're owned by Freescale, and 8 years ago they had better compilers for PPC around the time that the rest of the console industry decided to use that architecture. So everyone gets stuck with a shitty compiler that chokes on exceptions and doesn't get fixed because nobody uses exceptions because the compiler chokes on them. (Except Microsoft, I believe they ship the Visual C compiler in their SDKs, which is decent as far as they go.)
So let's say you get over your initial API shock, you have a decent handle on what all the little libraries do, and you wanna buy some development hardware now. Well, uh, okay. That'll be anywhere from $2,600 (leaked 3DS devkit figures) to $10,000 or more (leaked Xbox 360/PS3 devkit figures). You buy a devkit, of course, because you pretty much have to anyway no matter how substantial a cost it is.
You now have a decent port of one of your iOS games, and you would expect that you could just send it to the manufacturer and get it published right? Well, no, it turns out that they have the same stupid certification process Apple does, except ten times as bureaucratic. Your game has a UI element at the edge of the title-safe area and it gets cut off on a 40 year old CRT NTSC monitor? FAILED CERTIFICATION! Your game didn't show the stupid "don't pull out the memory unit" autosave icon somewhere in level 3? FAILED CERTIFICATION! and so on.
Finally, you get through all the bullshit, and you get a certified build. So you think you can just release it for sale now right? No, because your console manufacturer only releases one or two downloadable games a week on the same day every week. And they allocate the 100-odd possible release slots among the physical publishers, and oh wait, you don't have a publisher? Well, we're going to allocate you stuff from our first-party game studio's slots, which is where every other indie developer gets to pull from. And it turns out that you just missed a slot that was available two weeks ago, but they can totally get you a release three months from now.
So you finally release your game and it's in the middle of August where nobody wants to buy games anyway or you're releasing against something big which wouldn't have been a problem if Microsoft just let you pick your own release date. Your game tanks, but it doesn't matter anyway because you already are halfway through porting the next of your iOS games anyway.
And then Valve calls you up and asks if you could release your game on Steam. You muck together a cheap PC port from your console code (as it now has more features than your original iOS version) and hand it to them. The game sells much better than on consoles, you get to add more content, and all you have to deal with is TotalBiscuit complaining that your game doesn't have FOV sliders.