I think you are somewhat right here although the PS4 is also going to have stuff going on in the background. They demoed fast switching between games and the store. In the video they showed, a guy suspended Knack to open the store to buy and download Killzone because his friend who was talking to him on cross game chat recommended it. He then fast switched back into knack at the exact spot he suspended from while Killzone was downloading in the background.
I think it's safe to say both systems will have a lot more going on in the background than we had this gen. That is probably why they are both using 8 core processors. In Sony's reveal event they also said the PS4 has a separate low power CPU to help with background downloads but Microsoft claimed they can offload some of the work to cloud processing. We'll see how it all plays out. The PS4 is theoretically more powerful though due to faster ram and a very slight edge in the GPU.
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Okay this is what I have found, on the RAM side of things, each box starts at 8GB. The xbox one has ddr3 RAM, and uses 1 GB for each OS so that leaves it with 5 GB reserved for games. The PS4 has GDDR5 and uses 1 GB for OS, leaving 7 GB for games. 7GB of GDDR5 vs 5 of DDR3, and if this is true the highest PS4 game was already using 4 GB's of RAM, HUGE HUGE advantage in speed and overhead for the PS4.
On the Hard drive side, each OS is going to take up a lot of room and the Hard drive is not upgradable on the xbox one, so lets say each OS takes up 8 GB, that is 24 GB gone, so you will probably have 430-450 free space.. Each game is going to take up lets say 30 gigs, now add your arcade games and add on content for each game and really you might only hold 8 games or so IMO...I know it can do external drives, but I havent found out for sure if you can store games on there (doubtful) or just movies and music and etc. On the PS4 the hard drive is upgradable so go ahead and throw a 2 TB drive in there
, and remember the PS4 does not require game installs, where as the xbox one does...seems like they are gimping this machine on purpose to me, or just have made really really dumb mistakes.
edit:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/21/xbox-one-hard-drive/
says you can use external same as internal, I was wrong on the Hard drive thing sorta..still dont know if I would prefer internal or external storage.