There's a major economic undercurrent not mentioned: Sony sold the PS1 at a loss to get the gaming infrastructure built. Nintendo sold at a profit because they were a company that sold games for a living.

It's a testament to Nintendo that they still exist 20 years after Sony and Microsoft launched a war of mutual destruction. The original XBox cost $200 more to make than it was sold for; the first-edition PS3 cost $1100 to build and sold for $499. Meanwhile Nintendo spent $40 on the Wii and sold it for $150 and ended up carving out a niche that they still hold. If you look at it, the N64 was where Nintendo decided that they couldn't fight the console wars because they simply lacked the resources so they doubled down on a winning formula of doing more with less to create games that were fun instead of games that were Warcraft.

The reason most ports went to the PS1 is that Sony will throw money at anyone who will give them an exclusive. Microsoft will, too. Both companies love to buy up the firms that make their content and ruin them - while Nintendo does their level best to come up with fresh ways to enjoy their intellectual property.

It's a fundamentally different approach to gaming and commerce and looking at it as spec-driven misses the point. If Sony wanted sprites, they would have had sprites. If Nintendo wanted polygons, they would have had polygons.

Fundamentally? there was no internet video. If you were trying to impress people who hadn't played your games, a static image of a Playstation game looks much more impressive than a static image of a Nintendo game. But if you're in the living room of a friend, the Nintendo game is a lot more dynamic. Even now, Nintendo games are the ones that emphasize group play in the same room while Sony/M$ are much more about lone gamers separated by time and space who meet in a virtual universe that costs $80 a year to subscribe to.

There are very real psychological and marketing choices that drove those specs. That those specs emphasize one style of gameplay over another is by design, not by accident... and comparing two systems from different generations doesn't illuminate that choice. Hell yeah the N64 was more responsive. There was a time when every succeeding generation of chips was radically faster than the one that came before and those two consoles are from the golden age of Moore's Law.