so people are paying 600$ for better graphics, the Blu-ray drive is a bonus. GG lic.
BD movie playback is a bonus, yep.
Blu-Ray is an essential part of the system, not as a movie format but as a games storage format. Several developers are already saying they are limited by the DVD (~7GB of storage) format in the 360. Epic, Starbreeze, Rockstar etc have been pretty vocal on this point.
With Blu-Ray, games can be released as a global SKU, one version for the whole world (this is what Insomniac is doing with Resistance), this will save developers money. This is possible thanks to the extra storage, voices and text in different languages can be saved on the same disc.
Very good for European customers, no need to wait 6 extra months for a game release.
Shorter load times: Since certain data can be duplicated several times on the Blu-Ray disc so the seek times can be lowered. Another bonus for the PS3 is since it now has a HDD as standard games can take advantage of this to cache files to the HDD, lowering load times even more.
Among other things.
So yes, I would pay extra for the Blu-Ray drive in the PS3.
Movie playback is only a bonus for me, which I of course will take advantage of.