Well, I am the owner of an original issue PS-3 with the full backwards PS-2 compadibility. Even when I've had a few extra bucks I have not wanted to upgrade to a newer model because of the lack of backwards compadibility and my substantial number of PS-2 games I still play.
I am especially irritated about this because I can't play "Batman: Arkham Asylum" it periodically spams me with errors whenever I try, even in the various combat practice modes.
What's more I realized that the games I paid to download (Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, Final Fantasy VII & VIII, etc...) won't run either. I guess from some checking the DLable games from PSN won't run unless your linked to the internet as a general matter of course, but I had somehow not realized this before... and that's really, really messed up.
I'm not a proponent of some of the more elaborate conspiricy theories about this, but it does seem to me that we're seeing some messed up things about the PS-3 brought to the forefront. Whether some of the things about PSone games you DLed not running offline were known or not, they weren't explained clearly or publically enough for people like me to have noticed them in casual use. Not to mention that when you can't play your games single player without error spam (like with Batman) that shows some massive system archetecture issues.
I am going to be massively POed of Sony decides to cop out here and declare "Fat" PS-3s which seem to be getting the majority of errors (though some slims seem to be hit too) obselete and cut them off given what I paid, and also because of their refusal to continue the backwards compadibility.
I'll give it a bit, I can be patient, but if this hasn't cleared up by tomorrow, or we haven't gotten some good, solid, answers and reasonable action, I'm going to start looking to write Sony some nastygrams (and honestly, I rarely address companies that directly, I'm a bit miffed about now being able to do the games I want to right now).