The launch was. Firstly, it was insanely expensive compared to all other consoles, ever. It may still have the dubious honour of the most expensive console on launch.
The E3 presentation that announced it was also just astoundingly bad. Tons of memes came out of it like “attack the weak spot for massive damage” and “RIIIIIDGE RAAAAAACERRRRR”.
The launch games ranged from bad to forgettable. Most third party games ran badly on it compared to the Xbox 360. The dev kits were annoying to get, and didn’t have proper documentation. A lot of the initial exclusives were underwhelming and boring, leading to the meme of “The PS3 has no games”.
Harris left in 2008, and that’s when things started turning around. It wasn’t until Microsoft got stupid about Kinect and Sony doubled their efforts on quality exclusives after the success of Uncharted 2 and Infamous and the rest of that generation went the other way from the first half.
I mean I was only thinking of the major, mainstream home consoles. But that’s why I said "may”, the history of experimental game consoles and regional price differences is a whole study itself. But certainly nobody at the time expected Sony to go from a more lower priced option to the most expensive one.
The 20 GB isn’t remembered much because even the Xbox 360’s 20GB model was considered way too small even a year later. Even to this day, the basic model of any console or GPU isn’t really considered the standard, but the budget option.
At least the PS3 let you toss in your own HDD though. The Xbox 360’s proprietary ones (and all its other accessories) were way more expensive.
Really, with all the accessories considered, the PS3 was actually a cheaper console even at $100 more.