Is M.icrosoft really rushing or not?
At first, it may seem that M.icrosoft is really rushing the system too early, but when you get to know more about the console.. About Xbox Live, the games and the specs.
Now on just plain paper, the Xbox 360 seems a tad less powerful than the Playstation 3, but when you know about the 'unified shader architecture' which allows the Graphics Processor to be used to it's full power, of course you will never ever see that in a launch title for the Xbox 360 because the devs do not have the power of the full Xbox 360. ATI's graphics processor is 500MHz...
Now for the Playstation 3, It has a Nivida graphics processor that's 550MHz, although developers will be able to truly only use 60 to 75 percent of the processor's power while Xbox developers will be able to use 100 percent of the processors power (ATI)
For the CPU... They are evenly matched... but if you know SMT which is simultaneous multi-threading.. that is implanted into the CPU of the XBox 360.. What SMT is that it allows a core to create a "virtual" core that generally increases performance up to 50 percent. SO with three CPU cores... that sport SMT.. the Xbox 360 has the equivalent of six CPUs at work... which M.icrosoft says that makes the Xbox 360's CPU at roughly 80 times more powerful than the CPU in the current-generation Xbox.
Truly.. the Xbox 360 is more powerful than the Playstation 3 (Im not going to say how much) with all the little neat things that most people don't know about..