I have heard the the new playstation will be the Swiss Army knife of gaming consoles. It can play playstation 1 & 2 games it can also play dvd, vcd, audio cd. In the future they plan on having an external hard drive and a high speed modem or ethernet port which you can download demos of games, movie trailers, and mp3's and store them on the hard drive.
Some think think that the console could be used as a webtv type of internet browser

About the sony planning the shortage, I thought this at first but after to talking to a buddy of mine who has taken his apart and looking at it he was amazed to see the type of chips & processors that they had in the system he saw a couple that were in short supply so the shortage of components explaination seems plausable. He also said there is no way they could be making money on the system, more likely they are losing money so it does not make sense for them to hold back the consoles because the more consoles they have out before christmas the more games they can sell and that is where all the money is.