The Evolution of Gaming – Are we still getting what we want?

Here it is, 2 years into the current console gen, and I am feeling lackluster about how I got here.
Most of you know I started as a PS fan boy, until a chance encounter with Halo: CE changed everything. Within 24 hours of playing that first Halo game, I bought an Xbox.
The transition from PS to Xbox was a slow one, I had just as many PS2 games as I did Xbox games (more PS2 I believe). I also started my online journey on both these consoles. Xbox won at that.
Xbox 360, for me, dominated the next Gen, with 100+ games, yet only a handful on PS3, again, Online play being the major drawcard, and the superiority of Live (even as a paid service).
No small part of my enjoyment can be attributed to Bungie and the Halo games they made. Accessible, enjoyable, replayable, and something that I never considered I would lose… LAN-able.
With the new Gen, we knew there would be compromises with the (nigh) always online features, but losing LAN was something I never considered. Being online is a large network, but if you want to play locally, well that is just too difficult.
I can’t express my displeasure enough. Remembering that my early experiences were getting together at a house, and having a LAN, these were one of the key enjoyable parts of playing Xbox. Tragically I have now lost this as we move to the future.
I look at this and I consider other things that have changed with this move to more powerful online supported consoles, and most aspects are online now, suddenly my casual downtime comes with conditions; do you have internet; can you connect to your mates (in the same room); do you have the latest updates; can your country’s backwards infrastructure support simple gaming.
I guess I am just saying I miss the simplicity of being able to grab a switch, some cables and some Xboxes and just start playing.