Oh yea, just what would make me want a HD choice is seeing nasty girls in adult films in high definition.  Then we can have a contest of seeing which porn star has the most track lines in their arms.   That won't make or break Blu-Ray.  Movie support from the major distributors will make that choice and right now all signs point to the Blu-ray being the champion of the HD generation.   Also, a big thing for blu-ray in the PS3 that it has going for it is that the games won't be severly compressed like they would be in DVD formats. 

 Of course the sales are lacking, there really aren't many "Must have" games for the PS3, yet.  Once the developers start to pump out quality games that you just have to have, sales will pick up.  There are many who have not made a decision on when they are buying their next generation gaming console, and it will pick up in the next year.  I don't see any of the systems "failing" and making a company drop out of the video game business.  The longer a system is out the better the quality the games are, and there can be some amazing things done by developers once they figure out exactly the best way to program on the system. 

The "10-year" plan only works for 1 console - the market leader. Its a nice strategy, but it only works with the PS1/PS2 because of their dominant marketshare (because the competitors dropped off, and left the generation to one machine only).

This won't happen this generation at all. I can see MS supporting the 360 heavily for years to come, and still support it when the next Xbox is released. If Sony is still coming last in 3 years (marketshare), there is little chance for the PS3 to last 10 years.

 DING DING DING!

We have a winner!

You're not the one making the choice though, the multi-billion dollar Adult film industry and those who buy it are. You can't alienate that industry and expect everything to be honky dory.

And must have games don't make 600 dollars any less expensive.

More like 10 months.

Just joking. If Sony can pull itself out of this mess, the PS3 could last for 10 years. I can't see much of another technical jump any time soon.

If we're lucky, Sony will fold and spare us all the pain of seeing what pathetic few games it has exclusive held on consoles we'll never own.

Two words: Quad core. Not only will there be a jump, but we already know what that jump will be. Crysis is the first game built with a Dual Processor/SLI and DirectX 10 in mind. 

Every time a new system comes out, some people say: "I really can't imagine it getting much better," and yet it always does. 

I highly doubt it will last 10 years.  The reason?  Because PC games are going to have way better graphics than the PS3/360 in the years to come.  When Sonic Adventure came out in 12/23/98 it blew away everything that was on the PC.  The best looking PC game at the time was Half-life.  There is no comparison between Half-life and Sonic Adventure.  Gaming capable PCs were extremely expensive at that time.  At the time I had a $2000 PC and I couldn't even run Half-life on max settings(I think that basically means max resolution).  The Dreamcast was $200. 

Doom 3 was released on 08/03/04.  The Xbox was able to run it.  Reviewers said it was pretty close to the PC version.  Now, I'm not exactly sure how a standard definition TV compares to a monitor in terms of resolution, but apparently it's 480 scanlines.  I'm guessing it requires the same amount of power to display a game on a standard definition TV as it does to display it on a monitor at 640x480 resolution.  Doom 3 can be run on ridiculously slow PCs at that resolution, but it looks horribly pixelated.  However, people said that Doom 3 looked almost as good as the PC version.  Why?  Because you don't see the pixels on an SDTV.  The scanlines make it look like your running on a high resolution.  If you play an SNES game on an emulator it will look horribly pixelated, but emulators have something called "TV mode," which changes the graphics to how they would look on an SDTV by blurring them and adding scanlines.  When you do that they look the way you remember them.  However, HDTVs do not have scanlines.  You can't use scanlines to create the illusion that the game looks as good as the PC version despite running on a very low resolution.  In other words, a game on the 360/PS3 needs to be running at the same settings as the PC version to look just as good.  The Unreal 3 engine isn't supposed to have massive system requirements. It's much like the Doom 3 engine which looked way better than games with comparable graphics yet ran at way lower requirements.  I'm sure that for less than the price of the PS3 you could get a processor/video card combination that would run it as well as it would run if it were released on the PS3.  Unreal Tournament 3 is being released on the PS3 btw.  In short, it would be cheaper to upgrade your PC to get good graphics than it would be to buy a PS3.

The Creators of Crysis, which is being released on the PC pretty soon, said the PS3 and 360 would be unable to handle it.  Crysis pretty much puts Gears of War to shame.  So basically the PC is capable of running graphics better than a $600 system almost immediately, which is completely different from last generation where a $200 system had better graphics than an extremely expensive PC.  At the moment, it would cost more to upgrade your PC to Crysis level than buying a PS3 but that's going to change a year after Crysis is released.  But 3 years from now?  Come on, by then an upgrade to a PC that can run Crysis on max settings will be nothing and by then there will be PC games that blow away even Crysis.  As for 10 years from now, it's unthinkable as to what a PC will be able to do.  The majority of gamers are too clueless to know that they can open up their PC and put in a new video card, but they're still they're going to be looking at PC games and wondering why their system can't do that. 

The graphics of the PS3/360 will improve a bit as the developers figure out the systems.  Still, the PS2 released 2 of its best looking games, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Ico, early in it's life: http://ps2.ign.com/articles/606/606189p1.html and there's not even that huge of a difference between MGS2 and MGS3.  PC games this generation will always be ahead of the consoles.

In short, I say 6-7 years before Sony releases the PS4.