I'll be playing Tuesday night, but Wednesday I promised to go to my gf's place meaning I'll be away from the Xbox 360 AND the computer

Oh well, at least she is getting a Wii soon 

"Don't worry Xbox owners, the load times are rarely more than 30 seconds and don't occur very often."

So it doesn't load often, but when it does, it's 30 seconds. 

So after thirteen or fourteen loads, it cancels out the install time.  In playing a game 100 hours or so, I'm sure it will load more than 13/14 times.

Oh, and as for this review, the only thing in it that seems to be anything other then minor, is the texture popup. The graphics look the same, the frame rates are basically same.

The popup seems to be the only thing. And it's why this reviewer, who had all options available to him, chose the PS3.

P.S. And if you think I am being PS3 biased when I say the graphics and frame rates look the same even though they have very small advantages on the 360, I said the same about CoD4, that in those categories, they are the same (even though if you nitpicked, the PS3 looked better).

i don't mind waiting for installs, i'm not annoyed, other wise i wouldn't be getting the ps3 version. but what i'm trying to establish is that the developers clearly made the install mandatory for a reason apart from convenience.

look why don't you forget about which version is better and just play the one you like. This isn't like the diffs between the 360 and PS3 versions of Madden 08. It's little stuff like slight streaking in night scenes on the PS3 and 8 second longer load times on the 360. And tbh, I don't think ANYONE is going to care about pop-in when they're roaring through liberty city at 130mph with the cops right on their tail. pop-in never bothered people in the PS1 and PS2 eras and they won't bother you now.

Considering the 360 has no online play out of the box, i don't see why they don't mark it down for that.

 But the Cell and Xenon!!!! This is madness!

I agree that people should play the game. The problem is that people are very zealous about these things and discussions become bad. . . 

Kotaku HATES that PlayStation 3 with a passion. Considering IGN, Gamespot, 1up, Rockstar themselves, and many others have givens the PS3 version a nod for graphical AA and better colors in places Kotaku's comparison is quite poor.

They made the game knowing they were going to install, and with knowing that, they can make a better game (and they did). Once that game is made, you can't go back and remove a component that was expected to be there, and then cry foul because it's required.