Well, as I see it...
As someone already mention, there's only 2 ways to look on this: subjective, and objective.
We are all going on subjective (and that is ok), and it's just our personal time/environment/feel we were in.
I guess, objective research would include some formula of sold consoles and pc's, and number of games (and sold) for each console and computers. That should really give a close estimation of what most popular playing machine would be.
I am afraid it would be (doubtless) a PC
However, I am happy that, almost always, majority is wrong.