It amazes me that every time someone points this out, so many people will pop up and try to claim that there's no problem with PC gaming, that the author is ignorant, that they have the 'wrong' PC or graphics card, etc. As this article quite correctly points out, absolutely none of those arguments is in the least bit relevant.
If you have a console, or smartphone, or pretty much any other gaming-capable device out there, you just buy a game and it works. End of. In the very, very rare case that something doesn't work properly, it's almost invariably a problem that every other user has too (the apocalyps3 springs to mind) or your device has just died on you. Unless you go around using your game disks as coasters or smearing them with jam, that's the extent of the problem.
My own current personal bugbear is Dragon Age. Usually it works fine. Sometimes it just cleanly CTDs for no apparent reason, though lots of strategic pausing seems to trigger it on occasion. Sometimes my DLC doesn't appear, or it won't let me resume a game because it hasn't decided I'm allowed to use it yet. Then there's the toolset, which is built on an ancient database structure that is so unreliable to install that there's a 'Hail Mary' in the installation logfile. My machine is a custom build, with more memory that its OS can even address, no overclocking, up-to-date drivers and drives which are regularly swept for viruses and malware with AVG and MBAM.
It's not good enough to say "Sure, _that_ game is a joke, but that _other_ one's pretty reliable". We're paying our money to buy a game to play, not to enter a lottery where half the prizes are trouble-free gaming and half are hours of irritation. Demos are rarely any indication of stability, nor are reviews except in the case of really, really bugged games. And then, of course, there's the misery of updating your system and finding an old favourite suddenly doesn't want to know. Not to mention the increasingly inpenetrable measures preventing you from moving saves from one machine to another, or even keeping them if you have to rebuild. Let's take a moment to consider Torchlight's lamentable implementation of Steamcloud that can't handle more than one user per system.
Then there's the constant piracy war, with the poor legitimate consumer stuck between the crackers and increasingly desperate publishers. The continuing march to maximise revenue by creating hundreds of different 'account' systems that you have to sign into in order to play, many of which would dearly love to get access to your Facebook account. The constant spam of emails from 'Blizzard Technical Support' or 'NCsoft' offering you everything from beta access to free gold if you'll just click this oh-so-innocent link and enter your account details. The joys of games like DOWII that want both Steam AND GFW running before they will. And hey, look, a social network has appeared on both of those too! Want to link it to your Facebook?
To be honest, though, the biggest threat to the PC gaming market is probably going to be simple economics. It's getting increasingly hard to justify developing for the platform when you then end up with the stark choice of spending literally millions on post-launch support so your customers can actually get the thing running, or just pulling a fire-and-forget and alienating everyone who gets unlucky. If- big if- OnLive or a similar out-of-the-box service manages to start offering the good of the PC gaming experience without the fiddling about, then I suspect it may take off in a big way. But I suspect that for the time being the infrastructure for that isn't quite there.
BTW, I'm no big Blizzard fan, but I quite agree that they are one of the few companies who seem to know how to put a PC game together. Starcraft II and Diablo III are on the very short list of PC games I intend to pick up any time soon.
When my old system that wouldn't play anything new died I finally upgraded to a more modern system. Not top of the line but I can play Portal on it now!