Tearing appears in a number of PS3/360 titles, to varying degrees.  In most cases the average gamer won't even notice it, but it is there.

It tends to show up either where the developer has simply pushed the graphics too far vs the consoles horsepower, ran out of optimization time and needed to push the title out the door or its a port or other sub-optimized scenario or simply accept a small amount of tearing as part of the balance of performance to visuals - for example even Halo Reach, a AAA single platform optimized title if ever there was one, has some screen tearing and slowdown, presumerably because Bungie felt it was small enough to be worth the big levels and bump in graphics from Halo 3.  As you note GT5, Halo's equivilent on PS3 in a sense, also has some screen tearing too.  Again, PD seem to have accepted it as worth the balance of the visuals in terms of resolution, etc.

The Wii never seems to see it mainly because it's getting titles optimized for the Wii only and there seems to be less of a feeling a Wii title needs to be graphically superb.

Plenty of PS3/360 titles don't have it, and if it really affects you that strongly you probably want to check reviews carefully to pinpoint the titles that don't suffer from it.

Myself I try to ignore it unless it's really bad but I would prefer if developers settled for no-tearing and a slight drop in resolution that wouldn't be noticed by the average gamer either but would look overall better.

I think a low frame rate is far more annoying, as it can give me a headache in the long run.

I'm looking at you Darksiders and Red Dead Redemption

darkside is more on screen tearing tho(360 version).

didn't really notice slowdown but maybe its just me...

red dead on the other hand completly agree.

Incredible games with no screen tearing: Uncharted 2, LittleBigPlanet, Metal Gear Solid 4, Killzone 2 (possibly saw some in a part of the last chapter).

You might want to try these to get blown by the visuals :)

I'm not going to lie the tech issues this generation are ridiculous. However your Heavy Rain teearing problem is new to me. I played on my HD Monitor and I never teared that I recall.

It's not so much the PS3/360 as it is lazy ass developers who can't take the time to fix problems with their games.

I just platinumed Darksiders and that suprisingly is one of the least tech buggy games. Their was it's share sometimes but when compared to others it did well. (PS3 copy)

I have never seen screen tearing occur. What does it look like? Maybe I am just lucky, or not very observant.

So that's what screen tearing looks like... never seen it before.

I'm not even going to look at the screenshots...why would I want to discover a flaw I never knew about that makes my playing worse...then again...I play on a regular SD tv, so if I'm ever upset about graphics, all I need to do is just hook up to an HD tv and I'm baffled.

I didn't really notice.