Seems women have more common sense than men when it comes to gaming.

You're too wrong.

1) ps3 didn`t start worldwide too. Only in Japan + USA. No europe and other regions.
2) yeah, probably the price has nothing to do with that... =))
like 300$ vs 600$, yeah, not big deal.
Many people complain about price, but when it comes to sales, yeah, price doesn`t matter, only sold consoles matters.

 blu-ray does not make picture quality better. Video quality has always been dependent on codecs, bitrate, and the quality of the player. Now blu-ray can have a higher bitrate, but that only matters with MPEG-2. Every HD-DVD film has used VC-1 or MPEG-4: AVC, which not only give a cleaner picture than MPEG-2, but are at their optimum at a much lower bitrate, so the larger size of blu-ray won't make those films look any better.

  Now the quality of the player is also a factor. The 360 was not meant to be a high end HD-DVD player, so the picture quality of HD-DVD cannot be judged on that system. Look at a full HD-DVD player (even 1080i ones are rated highly) versus the PS3 to get a good indication of picture.

At the end, Blu-Ray is superior to HD-DVD.

Yeah, HD-DVD has nothing on Blu-ray. And the BD player in the PS3 is better than the 1000$ standalone ones. The only thing they had on the PS3 was 1080P/24, but the PS3 now has that as well. It also has the superior HDMI version for the TVS and projectors that are coming out now that support the extra bit depth. As for the VC-1 codec....some BDs use it now as well. I think its a given that BD has already won the format war. Having Disney as an exclusive only makes it worse for HD-DVD as there software line-up is huge and appeals to the soccer moms. As for the PS3 being under-rated.....it is without a doubt. The ability to access it from anywhere via PSP is huge in my opinion. Its basicaly a location free player as well as a game console, media server and BD player. You can access all your videos, music, pics etc from your PC without paying extra. The online is free, and the features you get over even the Extreme 360 make it a steal. You can do so much more with your PS3 than any other console and you dont have to be at home to use it. The games that have come out already are good games, some better than others, but look at the launch games for the 360....they sucked far worse than any of the PS3 launch games have. Sure the 360 games have gotten better as will the PS3 games. As for the GPU being better on the 360....it may be. But Nvidia had gone down the unified shader path before, so ATI wasnt the first. People keep forgetting that the GPU is not the graphics work horse in the PS3, it is there to assist the CELL. So it doesnt need to be an amazing chip. The 360 and the PS3 are both very different in how they work. The 360 relies very heavily on the GPU so they needed it to be what it is.

Who would pay $1000 for a stand alone Blu-Ray player? That would be the dumbest shit ever. How are companies managing to sell $1000 stand alone Blu-Ray players? How?

Sony has dropped ther price to 799 now, as have the other companies for the most part. Pioneer was selling theres for 1400. It had Ethernet and Windows media connect though so I think that was there selling point. People were buying them up though....and still are. I see a lot of Sony standalone players in people homes. The PS3 is still better though. Everything works much faster and smoother on the PS3.

Both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD still hang in the balance, many analysts believe both will fail, just because they're competing with one another doesn't mean one wins by default, they could both lose. Each has such poor market penetration its really hard to keep justifying the effort being put behind each.

Poor market penetration? What? Theres upwards of 10-million BD players sold, and software sales are at least double that of HD-DVD. I would say that they are doing just fine. If 10-million is poor market penetration than all 3 consoles are in trouble.