Prehistoric shaders ? I hope your not referring to to T&L units or register combiners for your sake since the PS2 has none of those ... 

The PS2's vector units were very much capable. It could do the aforementioned "bump mapping" and it can even do HDR! Hell, those "shaders" or "vector units" I would prefer to call them by was way more flexible than the vertex shaders found in the original Xbox and light years ahead of the gamecube's "flipper" in terms of programmability. 

PS2's shading capabilities were quite weak compared to Xbox and GCN, even its most advanced games lacked the shader work found in games like Rogue Squadron 2 & 3 and Halo 1 & 2.

Yet it was able to pull HDR ... 

True, but wasn't as capable at doing the kind of heavy multitexturing, bumpmapping, etc that the most advanced GCN/Xbox games threw around. Most PS2 games had barely any shaders at all, which is why PS3's full suite of shaders was such a massive leap.

All the bump mapping in the world doesn't mean a thing if you could get smoother surfaces with a MUCH better clipping performance too to offset the weakness. 

Just because PS2 lacked in shading power doesn't mean it couldn't make it up with efficient and beautiful post process effects like depth of field which requires tons of fillrate ... 

Console gamers should thank their lucky stars they get a newer console that has more power and thus more capabilities. They should never be compared to PC.

PC gamers should be thankful that console realm has finally stepped forward in the realm of power so third parties wont be hindered be demands of profit and sticking to a particular audience. They can get their games without issues.

PS2 was simply not as capable as GCN or Xbox graphically. Shading wasn't its only shortcoming; it has less RAM as well, and no hardware texture decompression.

Compared to Xbox ? Definitely! Compared to GC ? The difference was always over exaggerated to begin with ... 

It certainly does look like the PS2 may have less memory but at the same time it had more USEABLE memory for the developer compared GC when you take a look at the fact that 16MB was dedicated to audio and mini DVD drive purposes. Your right about the GS not having hardware texture decompression though ... 

That 16MB was still available to devs, just not for high access speed tasks. And the other 24MB was lightning fast compared to PS2's memory.

As for the difference being exaggerated, that may have held true for many multiplatform titles, but stuff like Rogue Squadron 2 and 3 was out of PS2's league.

Actually that 16MB was reserved for buffering audio and data from the mini DVD.

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000288">http://web.archive.org/web/20040508205541/http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000288

It was certainly lightning fast in terms of access times yet it did have a somewhat lower bandwidth compared to the PS2. 

I'm not sure if graphics like Rogue Squadron 2 and 3's graphics are out of the PS2's league. I think it's met a match with MGS 3 ... 

Although you may encounter some more rough textures on the PS2, however being able to spit out more triangles certainly helps obscures the lower resolution textures ...