I'm not clear whether those 150,000 standalone HD-DVD players were sold worldwide or only in the US (and some quick googleing didn't help). If it's only in the US then the PS3 has only sold about 1.2 million there and I thought the advantage was 3:1 now. It's 2:1 LTD but the trending heavily favors Bluray, which implies that the effect of PS3 in Bluray sales is significant. Especially considering BD standalone players have sold far less that HD-DVD ones.
Edit: I forgot to add that they're not counting the 360 add-on in their sales. IIRC it's the highest selling HD-DVD player (but it's not standalone) which I think it's well over 150,000 in the US alone. So the attach BD attach ratio for PS3 is looking a lot better.
PS3 had a bigger effect earlier in the year, probably because the hardware ratio was even higher then, and some PS3 owners may have bought a disc for the heck of it. The first quarter was nearly 3:1 in disc sales.
Since then it's been closer. A couple weeks ago it was 60/40. Generally it's been less than 2:1. So no, the trending does not heavily favor BluRay.
If you're right about this only talking about north america,
this article states the opposite of your claim about the 360 add-on, saying they are counted but PS3's aren't. I still think there's around a 10:1 hardware advantage for PS3/BluRay vs. HD-DVD, whether it's 3M versus a few hundred thousand worldwide, or 1.x million versus 150,000 in North America. The attach ratio doesn't look very good at all for PS3.
SPM, I don't buy your scenario. We're not going to see a high percentage of existing PS3 owners buy HDTV's and buy lots of discs before standalone player owners start dominating disc sales. For one thing, if they were planning on buying an HDTV soon, they would already be buying BluRay. It's just wishful thinking to think they'll suddenly explode as buyers.
It's going to be like PS2 and DVD, except with far lower sales (from both the console and the standalones). The console just isn't going to have a very large impact on disc sales beyond the short term.
Now, I'm not saying HD-DVD will win. Sony can still beat them in standalone sales this year because, well, it's Sony. Right now it doesn't look particularly likely, though.
If you substract the 100,000 standalones asuming similar buying patters between both camps you get: 1.4 million PS3 are comparable to 250,000 standalones (I count the 360 add-on as standalone since it's bought exclusively to play movies). That means that 5.6 PS3 buy as much as 1 standalone HD-DVD player. Even if PS3 sales continue at its snail pace it should still sell considerable more than 6 times what HD-DVD standalones can manage, plus with whatever standalones BD sells... I just see the gap widening and widening. Also your comparison with PS2 is highly flawed, since PS2 was an average player at best (crappy by most standards) whereas PS3 is top of the line and an AV enthusiast should, at least, give it some serious consideration.