And I have to ask: how much of a point do you think they have?
"(The certification process) is going to be a consideration, but for me personally, it's going to be establishing the best experience for the users," Yanagi explained, "and right now the speculation for me is that PS3 players and PC players are kind of different social groups. PC players are used to the anonymity of text chat most of the time, and then once you get to know somebody or are playing with friends that you know, then you go to voice and use Ventrilo or TeamSpeak or something like that. Whereas console players, I think they're just used to going into voice chat right off the bat."
"Or muting voice," Andersen quipped, inciting laughter around the room.
"I also found that console players will just talk smack all the time," Yanagi continued. "While PC players tend to be a little bit more polite because of the social group acceptance and how chatting via voice comes about."
If anything, I think they might have a more pro-PC bias since its SOE, but I don't think its enough of one to say they're wrong. If anything, I think the gaming experience sought after might have a bit more to do with it manners. If you're constantly doing pick-up games, then yeah, I'd expect to run into more trash talkers and the like. If you're running with organized groups (like a lot of folks do in MMO's), you've begun filtering out your communication, thereby missing some of the more colorful morons out there, typing or not. That's been my experience, at anyrate. For example, in Guild Wars and City of Heroes, I pretty much ONLY pay attention Guild/SG chat and virtually ignore the public chatter. It goes a step further in COH where the guys I game with have a private chat channel (cross server, cross faction, its nice). When I do pay attention to the local/broadcast, man, I'm not missing much.
In short, I think they're turning a slightly blind eye to the PC's community's morons. Just offer keyboard/mouse control as an additional option for the PS3 (and pad control for PC players), and let people decide how they want to communicate. I've got friends I've played with for years, and we've never wanted or bothered with voice-chat. Simply put - not everyone wants it, so make both available.
I'm really, really hoping they can have at least two PC/PS3 servers (one PVP, one regular), even if it has to lag behind due to certification issues. A PS3 would be a lot cheaper than having to do a full upgrade of an older computer (motherboard, cpu, video card, ram, etc) for some of my friends, and we wouldn't have to give up each other's gaming company due to platform if a bunch of decided we wanted to play DCUO (which is looking far better than CO at this point).