Sony Continues to Justify the High Price of PlayStation 3

well i have seen alot of comments and posted info bits about the PS3 and Xbox360 but not a single group has an over powering vote for one system over the other both have their problems but the most common about the PS3 iv heard is about their origonal video card team quiting and them having to resort to a new team and a card that is not specifacly for the systems structure and design, i was wondering if anyone could justify this rumor or prove it to be wrong

I'm not a gamer and I don't own a console, but I must say I was mesmerized by the demos I saw running at CES. May be it was a bunch of smoke and mirrors, but if the end product is anything close to what I saw, I would almost consider buying a PS3. ... Naw probably not, but man it was cool.

I would like to point out from a development point of view a consistent hardware platform is a big reason for developers to create Games for Consoles. The same hardware will always perform the same and will always have the same buttons on the controller. Currently the only variable they work with is the TV in both sound capability (stereo, Dolby 5.1, 6.1, etc) and the resolution supported. When a developer can't even assume you are using a standard controller with a consistent number and type (analog/digital) of buttons, imagine what it is like if you upgrade a Video card in your console from ATI to iNvidia. If the developer doesn't know what the hardware specification of your machine is they have to choose the Lowest possible setting. Anything different from the default becomes a cost/profit calculation. "Have enough of xx sold to enough of the people that would buy our game that we can make back the development time for that extra feature.

Even XBox 360 made this mistake by making the harddrive an option.
Nintendo had a similar hardware variation on Nintendo 64 with the Video Memory Upgrade. But notice this is still a limited number of hardware configurations. Not the "Future-Proof" possible number of variations I imagine based on what they have released.

Take this a step further and look at what WinCE allowed in the early days. Different devices had different processors, not just in speed but in architecture! Then there was the feature of screen resolution. WinCE could support anything from about 320x320 upto 640x480 (and higher in some cases). The developer can't even depend on if the screen is square or rectangular.
From what I have seen WinCE devices didn't catch on until (1) the device hardware became more consistent and (2) the Compact edition of the .NET framework which removes the processor architecture issue.

Developers can always write code to use any and all of these features to the best of benefit but each configuration needs to be tested, every variation needs to physically be built and available for testing.

I think that Sony has made many mistakes with the PS3 and this is just one more.