haven't you hooked up your playstation to the internet to notice?  some updates only take a few seconds but some updates (like the LBP water and paintinator updates) can be quite big actually and therefore take a long time to download.  let's face it...when you load up a game and want to play even a 20-30 seconds delay is going to piss you off.  to have it all done before I load the game would go a long way to making me happy.

It could work if you didnt play that game while it was downloading in the backround which would work for me, outrun while i wait is fine

Well I think you are getting updates confused with patches.  Updates can be big and that I understand.  But simple patches are supposed to be super small and quick.  I've only had a few games that needed patches/updates on PS3 and they at most only took a few minutes.  Still, the longest patch/update I can remember to a 360 game took like 20 seconds.  Not sure what the correlation could be there.

And I guess I don't see how 30 seconds of my time is going to piss me off. If I see I have a long update and not just a patch, I'll go make some food or check my email or do something productive while I wait.  Chances are there are plenty of things I have to do and are putting on the back burner to play some games anyways   If that's really the case with some people that they can't wait then they need to consider getting some help for a possible gaming addiction.

you are probably right about me confusing patches with updates cause you lost me there.  patch or otherwise i couldn't take LBP online and at least for me those updates took around 20 minutes.  typically when i game i only have about a 2 hour window anyways so 20 mintues is a pretty big chuck of my downtime.  on the one hand it is only a once in a while type thing but i still hate it. 

...and i don't have my 360 hooked up to the internet.  i thought the 360 already did background loading of patches and updates...am i wrong?

So, while I'm playing LBP offline they can update Uncharted 2?  Finally someone thought of this and decided to do something about it.  

could be very good, it really does not bother me because when there is a game patch my system downloads it in about 3 sec, then installs it in 15-20 sec, so its really not that bad.

It does background downloads, but not background patches/updates.  Those only happen when you are logged on to XBL and start a game that has a patch/update available.

That would make for a smoother PS3 user experience. As would auto-synching trophies. Here's to hoping both will come true soon enough.

This and background trophy sync = Win...

would be a nice feature for the ps3 to have