To answer everyone: haveing a single piece of hardware to develop does help, absolutely. But the answer is simply… money.
Sony pays to have have games like R&C or Uncharted made. These games wouldn’t be profitable for the studio to make, with the level of detail and polish, but they get $60 million (example number, definitely varies) from Sonyand now the studio is in the green.
That’s it’s. Console hardware is more PC than ever, having x86 AMD CPUs that aren’t that different from ones other OEM could just order. These is no secret sauce, they aren’t some crazy in-house developed flop or some weird also-ran processor like PS3 and 360.