Apparrently rockstar thinks that people's PS3s are to blame for the freezes instead of the game itself:

http://ps3.qj.net/Rockstar-on-freeze-issue-It-s-not-us-it-s-your-PS3/pg/49/aid/119867

I myself am a little skeptical of this. I could understand if it was a small minority of freezes...but the amount of people having freezing issues on their PS3s because of GTA seems a little too much to blame on all that hardware...I think there either must have been programming issues with the game...or they just pushed to hardware way too much. That's just what I think though. What do you guys think? Is it possible all these freezing issues are because of faulty hardware? 

Perhaps Rockstar thinks all PS3s are faulty.

In which case, they can go fornicate themselves.

Many people would argue that since the PS3 is full of untapped potentialzzzz that it would have to be bad programming.

 I'm not arguing that, but I do think that faulty hardware is unlikely. The only game I've had a freeze on so far is Assassin's Creed. I don't hear of freezes very often from other friends with PS3s....either they really pushed the PS3s hardware above it's limit or programmed the PS3 version horribly. Either way, they should have done more testing before launch.

I say rockstar have bad programing because other games work just fine on the same ps3.

Or the theory of some x360 fanboys are saying, PS3 is not strong enough to handle GTAIV

I blame GTA freezing on "faulty" coding.

Bad programmers blame the hardware... original...

it's clearly got to do with the programming, because if where really a hardware issue, then the freezing would affect all games not just GTA4. Though I wouldn't go as far as calling it bad programming but more like not enough QA to be able to find all the bugs which can cause the game to lockup.
By the looks of things, Rockstar hasn't been able to find that bug seeing as their patch did nothing to fix the freezing people have been experiencing, so I guess their now blaming the hardware for there inability to find and fix the bug in their code.

Or that the majority of QA focused on the XBox360 version...

 Seems more likely than all that "faulty" hardware. The 360 was the lead platform afterall, it could be very likely that they screwed up while working on the PS3 version. Coding isn't an easy process, there are some problems that occur that you would never expect to be a problem. I'm no programmer, but human error is very posible.