One week with the PlayStation 3

Yeah, I picked up a PlayStation 3 last week, in my never-ending quest for toys to entertain myself with... and I've had a Wii to play with for quite some time. There are a few differences that really struck me, and I thought I'd share:

• PS3 is prettier. Both the graphics it produces, and the shiny black case that contains it, are prettier out-of-the-box than the Wii. Of course, the Wii wasn't designed for high-performance graphics, and the Wii's case will probably stand the test of time better, but this is definitely a plus for the PS3.
• PS3 does Blu-Ray and streaming video. Yeah, I've heard that Wii might get a video channel someday... but PS3 has video now. Mind you, it's pricey compared to what you can get through a nice Roku Netflix box, but it's there. Side note: if anybody tells you you can't get good display characteristics out of a 1080p TV below 47", I will gladly call bullshit. My 32" does a very nice job with Blu-Ray movies... but then, I'm only watching from about 6' away - it's not size that matters, it's that ratio between screen size and viewing distance.
• Wii seems to be better thought-out. When you fire up your Wii, you're brought to a screen that just has the various channels that are installed and ready to go... all of the strange settings bits are quietly tucked away until you really want/need to go looking for them. PS3, on the other hand, has one monstrous menuing system, rife with settings tools, installer stubs, and the like. By installer stubs, by the way, I'm talking about icons indistinguishable from installed programs that fire off a download/install program when you click on them, which is rather annoying in some cases... for instance, the photo library program has an icon sitting there, but nothing will tell you that you need to install that program before you use it until you actually click on that icon. Downloadable content is similarly kludgy on PS3... where, on the Wii, your game is playable as soon as the download completes, the PS3 requires you to install programs you download... and with some of the demos I downloaded approaching 1GB, another several minutes of the console locked up while installing your program after a half-hour or more of download time is a bit grating. Wii's definitely got PS3 beat here.
• Wii has a low-power mode. Once the Wii is set up, it can stay connected even when it's "off", to update news and weather info, among other things. PS3 has to stay on at full power to do things like download game demos in the background... it does have a "turn off after downloads complete" option, but when I tried that, something went awry with the downloads, so the machine stayed on all night at full power.
  

So, in a perfect world, I'd love to have a machine with the PS3's power run with the elegant simplicity of the Wii's interface... but I still like both machines well enough as-is.