Not exactly a victory in its essential form, seeing as there are nearly twice as many 360's in the UK and this is by far MS' best European market it should've nearly doubled the software sales.
It sold very well on the 360 no doubt, but it sold extremely well on the PS3.

That is something to celebrate! 

What does launching a year earlier have to do with anything? 

The fact is that there is currently a bigger installed base of XB360s.  How we got there is more or less irrelevant.  You're alluding to the future by saying, "Sony is selling faster now," which is true, and Sony can celebrate their victory there once those faster sales turn into a victory, but, as NJ5 pointed out in his thread, while the PS3 is likely to pass the 360 eventually, by the time Sony has any sort of serious installed base advantage over the 360 we'll be approaching the PS4/Xbox whatever releases.

Give the devil his due, this *is* a victory for MS.  It may have been a mixed victory in that Sony still performed better than expected, and will probably see more benefit than MS from GTA 4. 

this is so ironic because Microsoft has claimed attach ratios as justification that they have done well in all of their reports. we have sold xx amount of units but our attach ratio is 7 compaired to 3 on the other platforms. now that attach ratio doesn't work for them they are just saying we outsold them by 100,000 units, attach ratio be damned.

Spin is fun

Well, yes.  Attach ratios are a good way of saying one of the following, "we sold a lot of software" or "we sold very little hardware".  In the end, what really counts is how much hardware you sell and how much software you sell, not your ratio of hardware to software sold (unless, of course, you're taking a huge loss on hardware).  

Look at it from a publisher's perspective.  You've got these platforms to develop for.  One has an installed base of This, the other has an installed base of That.  You only care about how many games you sell, not how many games sell relative to This and That.

Hell, MS will spin you in circles.  And because they've been losing so often lately, they've had to spin you in circles.  The European attach ratios they recently talked about were in a press release which was supposed to be a response to the NPD numbers (!).  How silly is it to brag about something completely irrelevant to the current situation, and, on top of that, something that doesn't mean success, but instead implies success. 

We all know MS is infamous for spinning information but what I want to know is what excuse will they use this time for the lack of hardware sales?

Shortages still? PS3 outsold it by almost 100k this week and without a doubt will lead in the NPD for April right?

GTA IV launch was supposed to solidify those claims am I right?

 How is GTA a Sony exclusive franchise?  It has been on the PC, DC, GBA and the xbox.

Considering the 360 userbase in the UK is almost twice that of the PS3 MS should actually be ashamed of only having an extra 100,000 games sold!

USERBASE BLAH BLAH BLAH, we all know firstly that the higher the userbase the attach rate drops and of course the usual User base, attach rate nobs conveniently forget about the piracy problems on the 360 and that the official software sales will suffer because of it, add the games that would of sold if there were no pirating on 360 and take away the games that would NOT have been sold if pirating was available now on the PS3 and you can see why 100,000 more sold is a big deal....

You PS3 owners are just sad you are like those nutters who go round with a sandwich board with "The end of the world is coming" every time the PS3 does not do so well, why should it bother you If One Multi corporation sells more of a multi format game than the other? you get the game either way so just SHUT UP your boring..