I'm an IT consultant and my job involves travelling to different customer sites to install software.  At one of the sites I went to earlier this year in London, I met someone who used to work on the PS3 development team close the Phil Harrison, and have discovered some home truths about the PS3.  Apparently, the PS3 delays were not caused by a shortage of blue ray diodes as Sony claimed to the world.  The real reason there were delays was because one of the developers miscalculated the bandwidth of the cell processor during development, the mistake was spotted after all the cell processors had been produced, ready to place in the system.  The bandwidth should have been set to 2.1 GB/s, but was incorrectly hardcoded to 2.1 MB/s.  This caused a massive slowdown in graphical capability during testing.  Each cell processor that was produced had to then be brute forced to set the correct bandwidth.  That is the truth behind the PS3 worldwide delays, not the blue ray diodes.

Other secrets: the PS3 development team keep a close eye on the Patent office, and saw that Nintendo filed a patent for the Wii remote.  Sony discovered this, and in a panic developed something to match it closey without infringing copyright i.e the "late arrival" of tilt sensing in the PS3 controller.

Also, as you can guess when the other Next Gen consoles were released Sony quickly brought them and disected them to find out the inner workings.  In the case of the XBOX 360, one of the U.K development team members went to the U.S specifically to bring back an XBOX 360 to dismantle it and use for ideas for the PS3.