They are not, the problem is how you use them. For example - fetching a texture data on PS3 takes about 50 clock cycles, while on a PC it takes 1000-2000 cycles, because the request has to go through all the driver layers first. PS3 uses its own version of OpenGL(PSGL) which has a much more low level access to hardware. That level of access is simply not provided by PC hardware, so it has to be somehow emulated - and for high performance GPUs we have nowadays, it's rather difficult.
I agree with your general point, but PSGL is pretty much never used. I only know of a couple of small indie PSN titles that used it, mostly to ease the porting process from PC. It's way too slow for the big games, who use a lower level API called LibGCM.
That was actually a big problem with PS2 emulation - some parts of the system were hardcoded to wait only a certain amount of time for a function to finish - because that function was ran on a different chip, and would always take the same amount of time. Now emulating that behaviour was incredibly difficult, especially if all of it had to run on a single CPU. The problem has been mitigated somewhat by multi-core CPUs,with each core emulating a different part of the PS2, but it's still far from ideal.
