Oy not this again.
Carmack has a history of strong dislike (an understatement) for Playstation 2 development tools and environment in general which long since soured him on Sony. In his now famous keynote he was all too glad to cite his distaste several times while he propped up the Xbox as "the most developer friendly console in history".
Newell and Carmack make some fair points from their own perspective, but ultimately it is a skewed perspective that should be taken in context. Being PC developers the in order multi-core wasn't a favored move to begin with, and Cell takes the design philosophy to a further extent than 360's cpu by a good margin. This isnt about processing power, its about how fast and easy they can code their game for the console platform. The biggest problem they have with Cell is porting their PC target code is going to be a major bitch to contend with, which means more time and manpower, and less money in return. 360 runs into problems too, but from the sounds of things it'll be a lot more compatible with their overheads.
The Crytek dev interview shed a lot of light on the situation for PC devs that are porting to console. His first impression was that 360 <-> PS3 would naturally be easier to port than PC <-> Console, but it turns out with PS3/360 there's even more of a gap in architectural differences. The Cell design is a lot more radical than anything else out there. At least the Crytek guy was optimistic about harnessing it's capabilility though and wasn't just thinking about his bank account.
