As someone into PC games I agree with the sentiment. SSD's have been around forever and it seems that now consoles have them it's now getting called a new feature. However, It does seem like the I/O does soundly beat out even top of the line PC's though. Reckon we will have to wait for Nvidia Direct Storage and the like to get used before we can compare directly because the new consoles have definitely hit new heights in that area - but one that is getting rectified soonish.
From the ArsTechnica preview:
"When it comes to load times, the Series X version of
Gears 5 handily beat out even a high-end PC equipped with an NVMe 3.0 drive (which stored both the Windows OS and the game). After testing a variety of
Gears 5 campaign save files, I found a 75 percent improvement for the console version; 53-second loads on my PC were as short as 12 seconds on my Xbox Series X for identical content.
In case you skimmed over that paragraph: That's not comparing Series X load times to older consoles. That's comparing Series X load times to
a top-of-the-line PC."
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/10/xbox-series-x-unleashed-our-unrestricted-preview/