I agree with you, its a lackluster launch catalogue, but BC, especially right now on first year, is going to be something very significant.
It was Sony who made it standard, every PS2 has BC, which is a selling point as PS1 owners could sell their consoles for the new one, every beggining of new generation you have a lack of games for a year/ year and half , the PS3 also had it...
But then they cut the PS2 BC on the PS3 less than 12 months later for cost saving measures and these models started to be sold used with a higher price, while the Xbox 360 had it since its launch for half of the OG Xbox games by emulation. Sure enough it had its pros and cons, not all were compatible and the list grew over the time, games received a resolution bump and sometimes even the framerate was better, but on the other hand it only works with HDD in and many games had small to big issues, still, it was there for its whole life.
So what Sony did? Years later they decided to create something called "Remasters" collections which were PS2 games with resolution and FPS bumps and sold them for 40 bucks, and then, they created the whole PS2 Classics thing which were PS2 emulated games sold on the store, disc owners had no right to download it for free, that means they were pretty much selling the removed feature for each game.
Now in the current generation (we are still until 10 and 12 november) neither console had BC from the start, that means people had to keep their old gen consoles to play what they didn't play yet and were awaiting. Then in 2015, Microsoft decides to introduce it as an emulated feature while adding games over the time, a move that was acclaimed by everyone, then two years later for the OG Xbox. Disc owners can download the titles for free, not all games (far from that) are BC, but all of them ran very well with zero issues compared to the X360, in fact, they always ran better, and with the One X, some ran at 4K and 16X Anisotropic Filtering.
Meanwhile, Sony decided to sell a few PS2 titles AGAIN on PS4, no right to a free download for disc owners, many people asked for Sony to bring the feature for free.
And now we are reaching the next generation and only Xbox Series X had marketed its Backwards Compability feature all around, working with all Xbox One games (sadly except for kinect only ones which like 95% didn't have) including its X360 and OG Xbox BC titles, this mean that for the first time ever since 2006 properly (or 2005 counting on the launch list of bc titles for the X360) consumers can pass on their old consoles because the newer ones will be compatible with their games, no need to keep it. While Sony, with their rich history of best selling consoles and titles, is only offering for PS4 games.