Currently Online 
What are they going for now? $250 with a $299 bundle? Not bad, but I wouldn't say "budget" until they hit $199. That's usually a pretty sweet spot for casual consumers.
Personally, I never buy consoles at launch. I wait for the library to build and for at least one price cut, sometimes two. Meanwhile, I enjoy all the titles the previous generation has to offer. For anyone just getting into gaming, the PS3 does have a LOT of great games to play with, and a lot of those games are pretty cheap brand new.
And of course they have plans for a price drop, they're just not going to divulge those plans before they officially announce them. No business does that, as it makes zero sense financially. It would be like shooting yourself in the foot. The key words here are "(that) we can talk about."
