It is the thermal envelope that defines pretty much everything nowadays. Without active management of it chips would die a heat death very fast. Which also means chips are designed with a certain chip external heat management in mind. The more heat you can get out of a system and away from a chip, the more powerful you can design these things. And game consoles do have active cooling, i.e. they sit between desktop PCs and thin laptops, probably sharing the thermal handling capacity with larger gaming laptops, if anything.
It is the thermal envelope that defines pretty much everything nowadays. Without active management of it chips would die a heat death very fast. Which also means chips are designed with a certain chip external heat management in mind. The more heat you can get out of a system and away from a chip, the more powerful you can design these things. And game consoles do have active cooling, i.e. they sit between desktop PCs and thin laptops, probably sharing the thermal handling capacity with larger gaming laptops, if anything.