Didn't know you had to pay to use the 360 online (yeah, I'm out of touch). Cheers, that might swing it. I'm an old Sony man anyway.
Well, I'll put it into perspective price wise because it is quite relevant. I don't think it matters considering your next paragraph, but just for the sake of it.
XBOXLive Gold costs about £40 a year if you pay for it direct, but you can get it for a bit less if you buy it from a retailer, you can probably get it for £30 if you have a little look. So, it's still a fairly clear cost. You are talking about a cost of a cheap game a year so it's definitely relevant.
The online on XBOXLive is generally overall considered as better, but Sony has been playing catch up, and has also added some really nice innovations of their own such as Home. It used to be a justifiable price for XBOXLive, it's not really anymore.
The PS3 has an embedded Blu-Ray player, and wifi. If you wanted to connect wirelessly using the 360, that's another price to pay. If you like movies, then the Blu-Ray is a great bargain.
It really comes down to this - if you aren't going to use online, if you aren't going to use Blu-Ray, if you aren't going to use the wireless.. then the 360 is better value for money (if you ignore the friends factor and the games)...
Basically, if you don't want the extras, online, wifi, harddrive, blu-ray, then maybe the 360 is quite cheap, if you do, it becomes pretty expensive pretty quickly. The bare bones 360 will cost you over £100 less than the lowest PS3. You'll recoup that quickly if you use any of the above features.
I'm an old man full stop these days, actually...
But yeah, my mates with consoles mostly have PS3s, so it looks like that'll be the one I go for. Doubt I'll be using online all that much, but I do want to give it a go - and thinking about it, I'd rather play people I know than take a chance on the 13 year old kids in online-land.
(I know theoretically I could play people off Evo-Web, but I've been out of the game for so long I'd just get hammered every match at the moment.)
Well, you do get a free trial (one month) on XBL if you do change your mind (I wouldn't if your friends have PS3s).