Because people are generally stupid.  Therefore they come up with conspiracy theories that are generally stupid.  They don't think about what they say before they say it.  And even if they did, I don't think it would help because they're surely not going to do any research or bother finding out about anything before they post on a forum. 

I think PSN is catching up to Live in a few ways just by offering some of the basic features Live has had for years. But we will see if that is the case when the Live 3.0 comes out this fall. Some people have their doubts, but I really trust Microsoft in the software update category, and I don't think they'd relaunch with something that isn't a clear step forward. People focus on the avatars and whether they like the looks, but I think we will be pleasantly surprised by the usefulness of it, especially if you play lots of games with friends - having the ability to do pretty much anything on the system while in voice chat with up to 8 people.

Just tonight I used voice chat to talk to friends while I was playing Civilization and he was playing COD, but we had to keep switching to keep another guy in the loop to set up a Halo party later on. In the new system we could have our whole group chatting and playing whatever we want until we were all online and ready to switch to Halo - all as a group and launched directly into a Halo party. Stuff like that is lightyears from what I can do on my PS3 at the moment.

But I will say PSN has come a long way since the PS3 launched. I was one of the big complainers initially.