What Sony probably meant to say : "We believe that providing the most powerful hardware possible, that can continue to provide more and more impressive experiences throughout a generation, is more important that producing an easy to program architecture"
Personally, I disagree with that philosophy anyways ...
Unlike the early days of 3D games, most of the improvements from early generation games to late generation games comes from artists using the available resources more efficiently, not from a better understanding of hardware or datastructures/algorithms. Basically, back when the XBox 360 was brand new many developers might use 40,000 polygons to produce a car and after they have produced a few games they can get similar visual results from a car that only has 25,000 or 30,000 polygons ... This means that they can have more vehicles (or a more detailed environment), or devote the extra resources to better looking cars or effects in later games, which results in a better overall effect without tapping into greater hardware performance.
All an architecture like the PS3 provides is inconsitent results from various developers and unreliable performance in game ...
It might be fun for a hobbyist to try to get the maximum performance out of a peice of hardware for a short demo, but few professional developers want to do unpaid overtime because they can't get a consistent load balance across the SPEs which causes the framerate to tank when they're already 3 months behind schedule and they have a long list of critical bugs that need to be addressed.
