The difference is the power of the console. Now you can get Wii-like games that actually look good. And the extra power allows a potentially much better interpretation of the inputs. That said though Sony isn't necessarily the best provider of tools and the hardware may or may not be on par. If the price of the PS3 can potentially go down and reach the level of "affordability" of the Wii, and developpers get enough support from Sony to use the interface efficiently this can be a kick ass combo.

Well apparently Paul Simon think it's better in black in white ;-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcR_LvorN_0&feature=related (2:02 mark) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodachrome_(song) ... But still, Kodachrome gives us those nice bright colors It gives us the green of summers Make you think all the world's a sunny, oh yeah!

Easy?? You obviously don't write games for a living :-) There's nothing stopping anyone from downloading a patch on some pirate site that simply allows the gameplay to run connectionless. If you want to make it hard, content needs to be on the server end. Think MMO for single player. Now I'm not saying it's not feasible but it's FAR from easy and very very FAR from costless! And you think no one thought about it?? :-)

That's true until you come up at the end of the project and find out that the bulk of the process usage comes from the 90% of "coded un-optimized" portions that people felt free to overlook during the process. If you write for any fixed hardware like a game console then the "add hardware" argument totally kills you. With that kind of problem you're pretty much screwed as you can't spend enough time going through every darn for loop in the project to optimize them so you ship with less framerate. The point about this is that knowing your algorithms or how memory works in the background will have you avoid this problem. It won't slow down development at all but will make sure you don't end-up with a resource hog. I'm not saying to optimize to death, but rather that you should strive to write optimized if you can and it's not detrimental to the readability. For instance, why use an algorithm that allocates objects dynamically when you can get away with a stack based one? Knowing this in advance will save your ass later.

It's a book by Charles Petzold that explains very well how computers work: http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/ The rest depends on how apt your grandma is at grasping concepts.