Sony had to bring their console out last year. It was one of the few things that kept consumers and third parties from defecting en mass to the other systems.
Sure, the price has cost Sony a lot of momentum, but they'd be dead in the water and would never recover if they delayed the launch to 2007 worldwide. Future games and price cuts may help significantly, though they will never have the lead they enjoyed with the PS1 and PS2 again.
As for Blu-ray, including this drive in the PS3 did not really cost Sony that much more in R&D. Without the drives included in the system, there would be no high def. format war... there would only be HD DVD. I think Sony should have found a compromise with Toshiba. If that happened, PS3 sales would be somewhat better and we'd all be better off.
Oh well, it is what it is.
Numbers are like people. Torture them enough and you can get them to say anything you want.
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