As an owner of both the ps3 and 360 I'd just like to chime in on this matter, in my opinion the 360 is a far greater gaming machine while the ps3 is a far greater media machine, allow me to elaborate:
360- First of all the library of games is still larger on the 360 due to it bieng out longer, and the ease of developing on the platform. While true that the ps3 is catching up and cross platform games come out on both consoles I prefer playing them on the 360, why you ask? well it's simple I just cannot stand the layout of the ps3 controller, I think it is horribly designed to fit in my hands, I much prefer the spaced out joysticks on the 360 (my thumbs always smash into each other especially when playing fps's on the dualshock 3) and the analog triggers on the 360 have alot more range of input for finer control of throttle and brake application on racing games.
I have to comment on the graphics, and while both consoles look great and each console has it's specific exclusive games that look better than certain games on the other console, when it comes to cross platform games I like the look of the 360 alot better, say what you will and feel free to disagree if you want to, but the texturing has always looked sharper and more detailed on the 360.
Lastly is online multiplayer and media center abilities, yes you have to pay for live, but it is definately worth it, online is almost seamless, matchmaking is fast and effective and you can jump in and play alot quicker than I've found with the ps3. As for the 360 as your media center, well let me say I think it's just garbage compared to the ps3, I have trouble syncing the 360 up to wmp11 and tversity media servers that have no issues on ps3, also playback of videos streamed to the console take longer to load and have buffering issues when streaming that are not present on the ps3.
PS3- While hardly a bad choice for gaming, it just feels to me like sony placed more emphasis on the ps3 as a media center than a game console, as stated above I don't like the controller layout and find it cumbersome to use, I find the ps3's need to install games to the harddrive a step backwards as there is nothing worse to me than having to sit through a 10-15 minute install when all you want to do is pop that new game in and start playing. Also the way the psn handles game patches is very poor, for some reason game updates take forever to download (for the record downloading demo's and videos off psn takes no time at all). for graphics comparisons see my take on the matter above in the 360 section, although I must admit that exclusive first party games sure look amazing, GT5P, Killzone 2, MGS4, Ratchet and Clank all look absolutely stunning and I will admit put alot of 360 titles to shame graphically. Online multiplayer seems rather clumsy on the ps3, and I find that it takes forever for matchmaking, and having to sync all the players up before a match takes longer than on the 360, all in all I think the online component simply just isn't as polished and the old addage of "you get what you pay for" comes into play here.
Now the real meat and potatoes of what I see the ps3 as.. a media player, it's true, blu ray is amazing, and the ps3 does a fantastic job with them, still regarded as one of the best blu ray players out there, it loads them faster than almost all other players out today and has all the features you'd expect a player to have, not to mention it bieng future proof through the constant firmware upgrades that are provided. Streaming video/music/photos from your pc is almost effortless and I believe it does a much better job than the 360, videos stream instantly and have no buffering issues, photo albums are sorted and displayed much more efficently, and sound quality wether it's games, blu ray, mp3's sound much more full and have better impact than on the 360.
Whew well if you've stuck through all of that congradulations! lol but there is one last thing, reliability. Yes we all know the 360 has a major design flaw that has not been properly fixed, I myself am on my 3rd 360, however my latest one (halo 3 special edition console) has lasted over a year and god willing will last another. While failure rates are lower than they were before they are still present but I really wouldn't let that factor into your purchase equasion as the ps3 is not without it's problems as well, do some digging and you'll come up with numerous cases of the ylod, blu ray diodes crapping out causing games/movies to not function anymore and the real kicker is that the ps3 warranty is only 1 year and after that you will have to pay usd $150 for sony to repair your console while microsoft gives you 3 years free on the most common RROD failure.
Both consoles are going to be around another 3-5 years so you can't really go wrong with either of them. The simplest answer to all this debating about wich is better is to just buy both!, I mean really with both consoles costing around $299 now it's not really that hard to save up and have the best of both worlds, the 360 for gaming and the ps3 for bluray/media and it's exclusive games. If you had to choose one, I'd still say go for the 360 first and buy a ps3 later on down the road when you can afford it.
