Nice MikeB, still tho, reading that phrack article on programming for the ps3 makes me understand why people hate it. He got that quote from some manual, I'd kill for that source book. It may be easier now to build from the ground up too but there's no good reason why Sony should have abandoned x86 or more typical PowerPC architectures so readily. But the difficulty programming from the cell is still a problem beyond the normal difficulties of parallelism given each SPU only has access to their onboard memory so you have to deal with segmenting the data for DMA.
My argument isn't about theoretical performance, in which the ps3 would clearly win. It's about actual performance given the time and cost restraints on developers. Unreal Tournament and COD ran in much higher resolution with better AA and AF on my PC built around ps3 launch than my ps3 even before I overclocked the shit out of it. And 3 years later the ps3 caught up with optimization and tweaks only to find PC hardware outpaced it. For 600 dollars now I can build a Crysis monster.
If you built the cpu at launch of the ps3 you could have a better system for 600 dollars but it takes some deal shopping. PS3 still can't hit native 720p rendering in most games. This ignores the RAM limitations that leads to other problems, like missing horse armor. If you just buy without shopping though or get it from Dell you're right though, it ends up costing more. And now that they got the tweaks the ps3 can rival those era computers in exclusive games optimized to pieces, but at the time it didn't really shine like that and most devs can't afford that apart from Sony.
Lastly, let's not forget that console devs use tricks to up the graphics. Think KZ2 corridor shooting. Draw distance is a bitch.
