What I wanna know is why they made 360 the lead SKU when the game will in all likelihood sell better on ps3.  Even with the 360 version reaching almost 40% of the ps3 version's sales week one in Japan, most likely due to the incredibly poor port, it'll probably still sell better on ps3 overall in the end.

You'd think Platinum games would've developed on ps3 while letting Sega handle a 360 port. It would've probably resulted in a better ps3 version than we see now, while probably not changing much on the 360 side of things, given the relative ease of porting from ps3 to 360 compared to 360 to ps3. And since a majority of their customers will be playing the ps3 version, you'd think they would've wanted to put their best foot forward on that platform.

Answer is simple, development on the 360 is cheaper and faster. By the way japanese developers are saying, ps3 has way too many hoops to jump through, and as the old saying goes, "time is money".

The other reason why porting from the PS3 to 360 is advised is because its easy, seductively easy at that to really chew through a good chunk of the massive fillrate/bandwidth of the Xbox 360 which comes from ED-Ram and that the PS3 cannot hope to emulate. This isn't so much a bad port. like Reasonable suggests, its more a game design which doesn't favour the PS3 at all. It was initially likely designed to be an Xbox 360 exclusive only and was designed as such. No developer with the intentions of always having a PS3 port would have designed it like that and the PS3 port itself judging from the game design was a late in the process decision.

But either way, development on ps3 was done.  Plus, I believe it'd be a bit easier to get a game running on ps3 initially then getting a game already designed around the 360's architecture to run on ps3.

We've seen this countless times from companies like EA.   The general consensus is it's best to port from ps3 to 360, because it's much easier than doing the reverse.  The only companies that generally do the reverse these days are those that consider the ps3 version of a game to be little more than an afterthought, like EA and their port of the Orange Box.  Companies like Criterion focused on the ps3 first and foremost, and it resulted in near identical versions of Burnout Paradise.

Given that it was Sega that actually handled the port of Bayonetta, it almost seems as if the ps3 version *was* an afterthought, which makes little sense considering the ps3 version will likely make up the majority of their sales.

This is what I'm thinking, and I have to wonder why it would be the case.

The PS3 wasn't selling too hot in late 2007 when the games development likely kicked off?

Well, I think they made a choice that made sense at the time (360 out, selling more, stronger SDK, etc) but the market has changed come release date and somewhat caught them out.  Of course, if you take some comments from Japanese developers as fact, then MS may have sweeted 360 as lead in some form, but I'm not aware of any hard evidence for this.  I think it just seemed to make sense when they started development.

I think the game will sell well enough across each platform, but with hindsight we can see they should have developed on PS3 as lead and ported to 360, this approach shouldn't have cost anymore than developing 360 then porting to PS3, as the extra cost of PS3 lead would have been balanced by the smoother, quicker port, while the end result would have been parity for a game likely to sell more in Japan on PS3, probably more in Others on PS3 and more on 360 in US with, based on DMC4 and similar titles, a good chance of selling more on PS3 overall (by a thin margin).

In the end, the port will cost them some PS3 sales but is unlikely (I believe) to gain them many extra 360 sales, as a PS3 owner who doesn't want the weaker port isn't going to buy a 360 just for this game.

I think in Japan they did gain a small number of extra 360 sales I believe, just not enough to matter in the big picture - so in the end I think the game will sell fine but a little below what it would have sold if it had been equal on each console.

Sounds like a pretty average port...
I wasn't interested in this game to begin with, nor had I heard much about it and now I definitely won't be getting it.