At the time I purchased the original uncrippled 60GB model, I was weighing the purchase of that against a Mac Mini as a media center PC. The PS3 won out, since it did everything I wanted out of the Mini. The PS3 did not, of course, run OSX, but it did run any PowerPC Linux happily, and mplayer/VLC/XBMC were capable of playing back pretty much anything the Mini could. Additionally, it had a unique hardware set that was faster at certain functions than anything then available at any reasonable price. e.g. I wrote a stupid fast (useless but fast) port of Conway's Game of Life using the SPUs as learning tool.
Add in the Blu-Ray playback, and card readers, and it was very very useful as a general purpose media center PC. Needless to say I did not upgrade past 3.15, and lost PSN connectivity back then. Everything was happy until the graphics hardware started throwing up random polygons when playing offline games.
The PS3 Sony sent back when I paid for repair/replacement was already upgraded past 3.15 (ignoring my request to NOT upgrade my console, and specifically telling them to return my console unfixed if a replacement was not at 3.15).
As a result, I am very thankful to again have that capability to run Linux back due to the jailbreak community. Sony screwed me twice already. If they permaban me now it will be a very sad day.
Ridiculous qualifiers? I think not!