It did have multitexturing capability, just not in a single pass. It as built around a different principle. If you have a GPU that can draw 300,000 pixels a frame with 4 textures per pixel, and one that can draw 1,200,000 pixels per frame with 1 texture per pixel, it amounts to the same thing, as the latter console has enough capacity to render the same pixel 4 times with four textures and combine them all (which I'm sure you know, but I'm just spelling it out!).
I'm sorry I should've added "dedicated" to the multitexturing part too, as I knew about the multi-pass needs. And wasn't the PS2's raw pixel pushing power in the 2000's? 16 pipelines x 147 MHz = 2352 pixels. And how many texture passes were typically performed on average? This I'd be very interested to know. PS2 is so funky, but at the same time very interesting. It's a fun system to mess around with as far as speculation goes with "another 100 MHz on the EE" or "64 MB of RAM vs 32".