Now, that implies that PS3 would be competing with multimedia PC:s, which have more processing power, rewritable drives and can be updated. They can also communicate with mobile phones, via Wi-Fi, USB or bluetooth, or digital cameras in the same way. And multimedia PC:s also have all the features what PS3 has. Of course, the PS3 will have a lot cheaper price in the next five years.
If we look the picture at a point, where goal would be winning in a console race and making money with a multimedia device, Sony shoul have released 2 kind of PS3:s. PS3 Gaming and PS3 Multimedia.
The Gaming SKU would have DVD drive for games, only the PPE from Cell (or max 4 SPE:s), HDMI connector, Wi-Fi broadband access and internal memory, which uses Memory Sticks (included) with one or two slots and you could replace one for memory expansion everytime you want to.
The Multimedia SKU would contain everything the "Gaming" would have plus Blu-Ray drive, large HDD, "full" Cell, the twin tuner Sony is planning to add, and every existing and upcoming feature.
This way Sony would have a gaming console, which would be somewhat cheap to produce and could be sold cheaper (and it would sell better than PS3 at the moment), and a multimedia device, what would be expensive, that would still push Blu-Ray sales beyond HD-DVD sales. And since both would include Cell, also it's manufacturing costs would go down every PS3 unit manufactured.
So, as i wrote above, how i think Sony should have done, the benefit, which OP sees, is only for the people, who would buy the "PS3 Multimedia", and don't need all the multimedia PC:s functions.
