It does not change the fact, that... well, If I want to play with someone ONLINE, I need to [tornado fang]ing pay for it.
Which is a travesty and I refuse to accept it.
Damn, I was supposed to say no more about this.
You COULD get a PS3, outside of Halo and Gears of War the PS3 has just about all the same games on the 360 (plus it's a blue-ray player). The reason why it gets so much flak is because of it's original high price point, but now that that is no longer a real issue, it's really no different, and it helps that it's exclusive lean towards the better and the more genre-broad (Cross Edge, God of War 3, Little Big Planet, Metal Gear Solid 4, Resistance and Killzone for FPS games, Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, and you can buy the old Spyro and Crash games through the PS3 market). Considering most 3rd party release titles though, there's very little difference between the PS3 and 360 (it helps that if you're a JRPG fan Atlus and Nippon Ichi seem to stick with Sony for their titles in that area).
However I don't know if the PS3 requires pay to play online, but honestly, outside of FPS games what other games have a good online multiplayer community? The game will either lag or you'll have move spammers or any number of things, so unless you absolutely LOVE playing games online, the multiplayer aspect is kinda dead.