[Crani]

The 80GB and the new 60GB also don't have backards compability.
I play a PS2 game (NBA 06) on the older 60 GB and boy what a piece of garbage the PS2 emulation is, the image was really awfull, so I think they did a smart move removing that chip, because it is not worth it.
And a friend of mine broke his PS3 and it's going to take 2 months for them to give him a new one. And all the new Xbox's come with HDMI, so you can play and view movies in full HD, it even upscales DVD to full HD with the DVD addon.