I know this is late, but an actual person who works in game development here, and also a person who has/still does work with Unity3D, and on developing for console systems.
on the context of a "launch Window" the reason behind this which is not only the games industry, but also any software, or hyper development project system. essentially the way it works is that either the hardware manufacturer approaches the developer/publisher, and requests a game be made, or the developer/publisher approaches the hardware manufacturer, and says "we want to be on your next hardware), but either way they are given a "target date" so these game projects are started with a target date in mind, but if the point at which this communication took place is not effective for the game to be created then it will not be finished in time, but some agreement was made that it would be a "launch tittle", the other possibility is that like with many other large/complex projects (in many other deliverable frames construction, development, research) things happen, and even if an adequate amount of buffer time was given the project delivery date slips, and so again to maintain that word of "launch" the hardware manufactures have gone to using 2 different designators either "day 1" (the first day the hardware is released, and what many people think of when they here the word launch), and "launch window" (a grace period for the product to be released so that the hardware can still be considered new)
when the Podcast team talked about having a system like Unity being able to port a game to different consoles quickly (a matter of days) is a slight fallacy. when a game is ported if the game was created effectively for its general functionality (to be memory, CPU, and GPU performent throughout) then porting the title should be only a matter of specific optimizations (should be trivial, but many times is not) the major issues with porting of titles can still take place with optimizing image sizes, and formats of different things. in the context of Unity supporting the "next gen consoles" Unity has already announced that the "consoles will be supporting Unity". I specify that the consoles support it because of a multitude of factors ranging from the Unity run-time environment conversions, the system excepting the Unity run-time environment, and above all that the creator/owner of the target platform wanting to put in the effort to have an engine like Unity able to run on it (this last part actually comes from the fact that in the context of Windows8, and WindowsPhone8 that Unity runtime actually has to be converted into a different that is specific to those platforms.
but the above paragraph only holds water if the game was created in a game engine/tool that supports multi-platform deployment, but the reason that a high majority of games don't do so well when it comes to porting is that for some reason that engine/tool was no designed to be optimized for all the potential target "native" framework(s). we can talk about the hardware being the same all day long, but at the end of the day your typical game does not talk to the hardware directly. this effectively stopped when the concept of a home-screen became integrated wholly (and in some cases earlier, but most reader will not care for those intricacies) . usually to develop for the platform we have to talk to what is referred to as "a native run-time" these are most often written in a C based language, but they all leverage the hardware differently (sometimes there is a difference in the graphics, or audio "pipeline", or there is a small difference hardware that requires specific optimization that does not happen, or that was done, but does not function the same of the other targets). so just saying that they have the same hardware therefore porting should be trivial is something that would only happen if they all had identical native frameworks which is like saying that a Mac, and Windows should have the same native framework (for anyone who has questions about that last analogy. can you run an .exe on a max, and a .dmg on windows)
