Some of it is. If you look around, independent developers will sometimes post actual numbers and they are often quite impressive. For larger companies, you really, really don't want to give your investors the idea that your income will implode after some random number of days. Ever wonder why you cannot really get sales numbers for unsuccessful titles?
Anyway, companies are actively working to mitigate this effect. This is why multiplayer with a centralized authentication scheme is so popular these days.
But again, you'd have to take my word for that, as I naturally can't post anyone's real numbers. :)

In any case, go to a pub with a bunch of game devs. Get them drunk, then ask.

Sorry, that's just not true. The first game I worked on was a PC title. When we released it, it didn't sell spectacularly, but did pretty well, with a noticeable day-by-day increase in sales. Yes, you can get day-by-day sale reports in some places. :)
Of course, we watched gamecopyworld and friends for the first cracks to show up and literally the day the game got cracked, sales dropped like a rock. Well, actually, they were still pretty stable for a while, just at a much, much lower level.
Sure, if you're Call of Duty you still make money, just a good chunk less. If you are an independent studio, you may just have to close shop.

And if you're a console manufacturer? Well, you make your money off of the per-unit license fees (and I guess off of subscription, if you're Microsoft). If those go down, you're in trouble, as you just sold your hardware at a loss.
If you're at the point where you sell hardware at a profit, it might actually be good for the manufacturer, because you will move lots of boxes. The gamedevs are still screwed, though.

... I find slashdot's collective hardon for the cracking of the machine somewhat distasteful.

Hm. PC games is pretty much a dead market, these days. Yes, there are Blizzard and Valve, who still make good money.
Everyone else though... not so much.

(former PC gamedev)

Nah, VLT has much better resolution than Hubble, something like a factor of 3 at near infra-red. Adaptive optics FTW.

Actually, Remedy sold the rights to Max Payne to Rockstar, back in the day. This allowed them to stay independent and do Alan Wake. They were never supposed to do Max Payne 3.

(All IIRC)

As a graphics programmer, I must say that it's not so clear cut. Back in the day, the XDK-tools were much better. But nowadays, the PS3 has some really, really good tools. API-wise, I think it's a matter of taste. I prefer libgcm to DirectX, but the latter surely comes with more features "out of the box".

All in all, my experience is that you get stuff working so-and-so on the Xbox faster. But to get it up to maximum speed, you spend just as much time. So the 360 clearly wins in the prototyping department, but that won't necessarily get you to submission faster.

FTFY.

Being a (former) PS3 and 360 dev, I have to say this is not true. Let's start with the memory split. Both consoles have about 20GB/s of memory bandwidth per memory system. Only the PS3 has two of them, giving it twice the memory bandwidth. The 360 compensates for that by having EDRAM attached to the GPU, which removes the ROP's share from your bandwidth budget. Especially with a lot of overdraw, the bandwidth needed by the ROPs can get huge (20GB/s, anyone?), so this would be a nice solution where it not for two things: the limited EDRAM-size and the costs of resolving from EDRAM to DRAM.
The RSX can also read and write both to XDR (main memory) and DDR (VRAM), giving it access to all of memory. The reason it is tighter on texture memory is because the OS is heavier.

About access to VRAM, it is true that reading from VRAM is something you don't want the Cell to do. It's a 14MB/s bus, so it is of no practical use for texture data. Writing into VRAM is actually pretty ok, as it's at 5GB/s, which is more or less achievable without trouble. At 60fps that's more than 80MB per frame.

In general, both design teams made sound decisions. The 360 has a significant ease-of-use advantage to PC developers with DirectX experience. The PS3 on the other hand is a lot more to-the-metal, but allows for some pretty crazy stuff. Sadly, most development these days is cross-platform, so you won't see a lot Cell-specific solutions. It's just not cost-effective.