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but the ps3, while having the best hardware,

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I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, as it is true im some respects: has bluray and low failure rate, but the actual gaming processor is not as good as the 360 for gaming.

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I thought that the ps3 had more power under the hood than the 360 although I have heard that the xbox is much easier to program for. This is the reason cross platform games come out better on 360. I myself own the 360 and can't think of any reason I'd rather have a ps3.

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Like blackize mentioned, the PS3 outperforms the 360 only in theoretical peek FLOPS, FLoating Point Operations Per Second. This doesn't really mean a whole lot in the real world though, since a game is alot different than just multiplying a huge stream of precomputed perfectly parallizable floating point values - which is how they would obtain their peak theoretical FLOPS values.

There's not alot to say about that. It really just doesn't mean anything at all, but it's the basis of all the prerelease PS3 hype about its processing 'advantage'. It's also not like if you just had sufficiently skilled programmers they could get games exploiting the advantage in FLOPS, it's just not relevant.

A [terrible] analogy would be a guy who could hit a baseball further than anybody else, but only if it was thrown in exactly one particular fashion by exactly one particular pitcher at one particular stadium and only in one 5 second frame and it also had to be one particular baseball as well. If any of those conditions weren't met, he just reverted to being an average batter. He might have the potential to hit the ball further than anybody else, but he's not going to be winning any homerun derbies. The best batting coaches in the world aren't going to be able to help him if he needs all those conditions to be able to do his thing.

Anyhow, that's in regards to the processing power. As far as the graphics cards go, the 360's is superior by just about any metric.