Thing is... define region. I usually import half my games from the UK, as in Germany, a lot of games get cut (because of our f'ing youth protection laws) or because they cost less than half as they do here. That's still PAL and with some (not all, mind you) games, it doesn't work, when it should, because it's the same game with different language strings and different audio dubbing (if that... in many cases it's PAL5 anyways). It could work... but because the serial number of the game is different, I don't know (the same is true for savegames, too, though that isn't THAT much of a problem and was already an issue on PS2, too).
With the store stuff... yes, Sony could've fixed it. But they SHOULD've fixed it a WHILE ago. The searching issue was always there... no options to include or exclude stuff, no sorting... that's pretty basic stuff, mind you. The same goes to displaying information in a good fashion. If I want to buy something, I want to know the size, too... I used to go online on a pretty bad connection up until recently, which prevented me from downloading pretty much everything, but smaller stuff... but I couldn't tell if demo X or update Y was 10mb or 25GB before I actually started downloading said files.
And installing DX... somewhere in Valves forum, some Valve guy explained why they need to install DX for every game individually (it boils down to different minor versions of DX etc.). But you can't compare THAT to 10 minute installations of games on PS3. Or even more (LA Noire with its 23 or whatever Gigabytes will take a LONG while on that original slow ass drive).
Imho, there's sooooo many small things on PS3 that make me not want to play it anymore. It's never a big showstopper, but all the barriers of me actually being able to start a game. Installing it, patching it, taking FOREVER to start etc... and that's not even touching the issue of "I download game a... installing it... oh it needs a patch that is the size of the game again (probably is the full game again with an updated elf)... and then it has ANOTHER patch". That's INEXCUSABLE. Why not provide the CURRENT download? Steam does that! It's not sorcery to give the player the files he actually needs, instead of old ones that need an upgrade anyways. It even adds cost to Sony, as traffic isn't free, by any means, either.
Couple that with games that take over an hour to install (GT5), which also need updates to total up to several gigabytes by now, probably... it's a mess.Now, I don't mind patches per se, but the process needs MASSIVE streamlining (not just PSPlus people should get patched automatically, plus smaller patch sizes, as on 360).
But is it worth the development time to build a complete game around cutting down on the install time unless you really have an exceptionally good reason, like wow does? The "level" based games may be able to do it easier since the can just cache the files to the Harddrive the first time you use it, but games that rely on streaming or constantly reads data might require more time and money to make it work. Again, i would much rather have Sony/Microsoft focus on speeding up any install, partial or complete in any which way they can, and save the money and time from the developers so they could focus on the games.