are you kidding me?

i understand that to you blu-ray playback is not important (i personally wouldn't use it) but you are seriously trying to tell me the BEST move for sony strategically (with all things considered) would be to drop their emerging movie format from what will soon be the lowest priced player on the market? You are truly blind if you think removing blu-ray movie playback would be a good move for sony and sit well with their shareholders.

Honestly I have been gaming fine without exorbitant use of a hard drive. Technically my Wii does not have one. I could probably get by with relative ease on my 360 as well. Games do not need to use a hard drive. Further more consoles without hard drives can still play online with other players. There are ways to work around not having a hard drive. Having memory cards or small system storage should suffice. Even if the machine cannot support them directly there is always the option of integrating a reader into a controller such as in the 64 console.

Further more downloading arcade games while useful could be accomplished with compilation discs. Thats what the industry did before the introduction of online connectivity. Most consoles can play movies, and most cable companies seem to possess on demand services. Even ignoring those you can get greater value from movie mailers like Netflix. So the convenience is actually more expensive. While if you are patient you can get a greater value. Even the demos were easy enough to get through magazine offers, or simply registering your console. Who here still has that old Banjo Kazooie tape?

A hard drive is hardly a necessity unless a developer chooses to make it so. We got by fine without them until the current generation, and the fact that you can still buy consoles without them means they are still not necessary.

Backwards compatibility though brings a lot of value. You gain a larger library to choose from with many titles that can be purchased at a bargain. You can afford to do away with your old console, and as a added bonus you will always have more games at your disposal to play. I could not image losing the ability to play my Kotor, or up until recently my Halo 2, or even my Ocarina of Time. That would be a tragedy. I love all those games, and come back to some of them three or four times a year.

For my backwards compatibility is king. Technically I do not need a hard drive. I would however consider a console without backwards compatibility half of a machine. Good games withstand the passage of time in the hearts of those that love them.

Backwards Compat.

Hard drives can easily be bought and put into a console, backwards compatability? You can't mod a console to have that =

@Ameratsu, your right, removing blu ray support would be foolish. Never having put it in would have been sensible.

I buy a console to play games. As such, BC is of course what I would choose, as BC allows you to plya more games, while hard drive is a useless thing that can be added later. BC can't.
Should be obvious.

It's really a no-win situation for Sony because if they had taken out the hard drive instead there'd be people bashing them for making their own version of the 360 core (which gets bashed a lot for excluding a hard drive).

They were called HDDs long before high def came along, it just wasn't necessary.

A HDD in a next gen machine is essential in my opinion (not including the Wii)

HD graphics are very memory hungry and nobody wants to sit there waiting for high res textures to load off a slow (and sometimes noisy) DVD/BD drive, I feel that MS are really going the wrong direction in not making the HDD something developers can depend on.

As soon as the whole industry moved onto high speed optical drives, the reliability of games consoles plumited, its almost impossible to find a PS1 that doesn't have read problems, yet previous generations will work as well as the day they were bought, 15- 20 years ago. I think this is essential for a console. Being able to install big chunks af frequently accessed data to a HDD will not only vastly reduce loading times, but also vastly improve the lifetime of the laser.

In short, BC is nice to have, but only really important in the first 12 - 18 months of a machines launch, when good games for it are rare, once the AAA titles are out for the machine, most people wouldn't give a second thought to playing last generation games.

some people are so retarded saying things like oh its not got backwards compatibility with ps2 im gonna get a360 instead, its not as though 360 plays ps2 games

 No but people concerned about BC generally want a large library, which the 360 has and the PS3 doesnt. The 360 also has emulation (albiet poor emulation) of the Xbox. 

Why do I get the feeling that your just another hus account.

It depends if I have the previous system. If I bought a PS3, BC would be incredibly important to me, as I don't own a PS2, and there are many games that I would like to play. Hard drive (if it wasn't necessary to play every game) wouldn't matter so much, so long as I had somewhere to save my games. the 512MB internal flash in the Wii is good enough for me, saves my games and stores Vitrual Console games. A small store of flash memory in the PS3 would be cheaper than a Hard Drive, if games didn't require multi-GB installs to play.