This sounds painful. 256M of RAM. No access to the graphics card you bought. No access to video output unless your monitor supports Digital Restrictions Management. No access to certain parts of the disk. (Perhaps the most pointless security measure ever. You can just remove the disk and put it in another machine and forget about the restrictions.)

I'm sure the hardware is cool... but with such a restricted device, who cares? Wake me up when I don't have to beg a computer program for permission to use my own property.

Let's say your area of research just so happens to involve the Cell processor. Then let's say that you have a choice: $600 PS3, or $20,000 Mercury Solutions Cell Blade?

For less than the cost of two desktop machines, we have a cluster of PS3s that lets us get research done. Now, don't buy the hype: a cluster of PS3s is not a great platform for high performance computing for the reasons you mentioned; 256MB of RAM for each node means your data sets are going to be small. But for getting research done cheaply, it's great.

I feel IBM hasnt really taken Cell to its full potential and it will probably lose the performance crown to x86 in 2-3 years unless IBM gives the performance a badly needed performance boost. GPUs can also beat cell in some tasks.

I too think that there is untapped potential with cell processing - specific tasks that the cell processors are more adept at performing. There have been some interesting publications about cryptography and password cracking using PS3's cell processing technologies published in the past several months - something you do not see branching out to other such related tasks.