The launch was. Firstly, it was insanely expensive compared to all other consoles, ever. It may still have the dubious honour of the most expensive console on launch.
The E3 presentation that announced it was also just astoundingly bad. Tons of memes came out of it like “attack the weak spot for massive damage” and “RIIIIIDGE RAAAAAACERRRRR”.
The launch games ranged from bad to forgettable. Most third party games ran badly on it compared to the Xbox 360. The dev kits were annoying to get, and didn’t have proper documentation. A lot of the initial exclusives were underwhelming and boring, leading to the meme of “The PS3 has no games”.
Harris left in 2008, and that’s when things started turning around. It wasn’t until Microsoft got stupid about Kinect and Sony doubled their efforts on quality exclusives after the success of Uncharted 2 and Infamous and the rest of that generation went the other way from the first half.