Re:What I want to know... (ease of programming) (Score 1)

You nailed it. The PS2 was an initial nightmare -- until you got those internal libraries built, everything was hand assembly (and, to make matters worse, almost all the documentation was in Japanese). Then, add the fact that the initial round of development tools themselves, especially debuggers, were woefully inadequate. I'd guess the typical company would have to invest a small team for about a solid year to get core libraries build to begin assembling PS2 games of any quality. This is where I believe Xbox has had some muscle, because the typical PC developer can literally port to the Xbox in a matter of weeks in many cases.

I agree with others here that while the PS3 chip specs are looking interesting, past history would tell us that they will most likely be delivered with little to no documentation, tools of fairly shoddy quality, and probably will require assembly-level programming and strong knowledge of multithreading and balancing of parallel processing to get the most out of the hardware. It will probably take another year of investment in core engine and library changes to begin developing a serious PS3 title, which itself will probably need 18-24 months. I'd gladly like to see the PS3 delayed a year and let Sony develop some good documentation and tools before throwing this hardware on the dev community.