This post maybe late, but I can not see that ms, not replace the boards in the elite machines because, on 65nm the lower material and cost of fabricating such board, will cost less, so improving the profits, it makes sense that they will replace it. With Jasper boards, it will only increase there profits, besides that Jasper boards require less wattage, so another decrease in heat and power consumption, so that even the power supply will be reduced in stress & material, another key to lowering the prices of the xbox 360 and increasing profits if one were not to lower the pricing.
On the other hand the ps3 does not require one to pay for online services, so you can play the games online for free. Besides that the two machines are quite similar in regards, that they are both embedded machines with a set standard, so any games that are created will be balanced to some degree, but this is assuming that the code is error free, and no changes has been made that significantly changes the game, despite that most significant is parallel programing on these embedded system.
Besides those points, the ps3 seems to utilize more established standards so as to having hard drives replacement at a fraction of the cost of the xbox 360, even than the xbox 360 does use the same hard drive interfaces, its just that they have locked the drives, so one has to mod a drive for it to work with the xbox 360 which may lead to even bans, abit of a propertary practice one could say.
One should really base the purcahse of a system based on the game really. Since both systems are just similar set of standards, games are both ported between the two, of course there are personal factors such as comfort with controls, download content and advantages of a controller. ie in street fighter iv, one may have a lower advantage versus a ps3 controller due to if just using the directional pad, the 360's directional pad is tight, when pressing one direction an acidental trigger of the oposite direction may happen, versus the latter controller. But this is just speaking of a stock controller, of course any consumer may purchase an after market controller.
Another problem is that between the two same copies of the game ported between each system, there are problems, in terms of bugs or graphical glitches, ie Dragon ball z on the ps3 and xbox 360, or Assassins Creed on the ps3 and xbox 360, especially on the computer. Ports between these platforms do prove that they either are done well or poorly.
