EA is lazy ...
they say : copy it much easier .. lets copy it!

HL2 is a few years old, but Episode 2 is only two months old. They didn't just use exactly the same engine, they added plenty of effects, used much more detailed textures, models, and shaders, and had a lot more enemies on the screen at once. Here's a quote from the article:

So it seems they didn't have much trouble getting HL2 to run, the problems were mainly in EP2. 

Quote from IGN editor Ryan Clements

"The remainder of our criticisms are to blame for the discrepancy in scores between the PlayStation 3 version of the game and the 360 version (the PS3 version, after all, wasn't handled entirely by Valve). The PlayStation 3 Orange Box performs far worse, and this fact just isn't up for debate. While framerate issues aren't as problematic in Half-Life 2 and Episode One, Episode Two suffers a great deal, especially during the episode's larger battles. We regret to say that some sections border on being unplayable because of the stutters, which often cause your aim to be thrown off and timing shots to be very difficult. The problem isn't persistent throughout, but when it hits, it hits hard."

"Almost all the PS3 load times are at least five seconds more than the 360, but loading a saved game/loading after death is particularly awful. These clock in at about two to three times as long as the 360 version, which slows down the gameplay considerably."

Sounds like their reviewing Madden 08 again. What's the point of buying 5 games if three of them have frame rate issues and ridiculous loading times?

I'm still gonna buy it.

Yeah I'm not sure if I'll be picking this up, I'm used to PS3 exclusives blowing anything I've seen elsewhere out of the water, I'm not going to pick up a game that pales in comparision to either of the other versions. I support half life full heartedly, but I don't support crap-tastic ports. The fact that Valve didn't even work on it bothers me also :P There will be quite a few new additions to our PS3 library comming into this next year, and the Orange Box will not be one of them.

It seems to me that the team that ported the Orange Box to PS3 didn't do a good job of optimizing the Source engine for PS3. The line you quoted from the review basically implies that there are issues in HL2 and Episode One but they are more infrequent. The newer games like Portal, TF2, and Episode 2 have much more frequent problems. I am guessing since the older games don't push the Source engine as much the problems rarely present themselves.

Oh I'm not saying they did a great job, just that it's not as bad as OMG A THREE YEAR OLD GAME CANT EVEN RUN.

I had a feeling EA would screw it up.  Despite that, I was looking forward to it.   This is really sad. 

My only gripe is that they got it to work just fine on the 360 and PC :P, I say if Insomniac can get Ratchet and Clank futures to run damn near flawlessly, with high res textures, 60 FPS, in 720p with thousands of things going on screen at a time, using an "updated" verion of thier first engine ever created on the PS3 then what problems could Valve or (uber computor god's) be having here? Gabe just really doesn't like the PS3 is what I'm gathering from it all lol. And if he does't want to bless me with goodies then I can take my $60 elsewhere :D

Valve got it working on the 360 and PC.  EA flubbed the PS3 version.