If your guild can run 25, then yes there's no reason (outside of achievements/maybe 1 or 2 drops from hardmodes). The point of the 10 man is if you just can't get a full 25 people together, then you can still raid.

I wouldn't say useless plastic, it gives you something to grip when pressing the lower buttons, otherwise you've got to some pretty crazy gymnastics with your thumb, plus you need space for the batteries somewhere.

As for the rest of the design, well it looks good, it has enough butons to be useful, while having the (now mandatory on any remote) arcane button or two (red?, yellow?).

Anyhow, should I ever get a PS3 I'll never get the remote, as long as the controls are as good as the PS2's I'll have no problem navigating with the standard controller

Seriously games got on before without rumble, it really ends up being a gimmick in most games (RPG's especially), and you got by without it before, and it'll be no big loss. Maybe in driving games it works really well, after all you can see directly beneath you so it's a good indication of pavement, though I'm not too big on race games. But it's hardly essential in FPS, after all if it really were, then that little game called Half-Life could hardly have taken game of the year, right? Also in Halo, a quarter of your screen turns red when you're hit, it's rather difficult to not notice, not to mention it also tells you from which direction you're being hit, unlike the rumbling.
So really runble isn't a vital part of the gaming experience, and, if done right I see motion sensing to be a more 'immersive' mechanic. And either way the fact that it actually works as an input method, allows it to be much more versitle than rumble.

I know it seems a bit niche in America, but I bet their target audience is in Japan, specifically those in the big cities with tiny apartments. I only stayed there a week but man, those spaces can get tiny, so this will probably be good for not annoying the neighbors. Probably a bit more than a niche market there, but not a much in the USofA considering people tend to have larger spaces here
Still the idea is rather interesting, I like listening to music/sound effects fairly lound, especially if I can crank the bass, but the sound does tend to carry so I can't be doing it late at night. If it works as well as claimed then I should be able to enjoy my beats and explosions without getting a noise complaint from the apartment below me.
And as for multichannel, that really sounds kinda gimmicky, with only one unit it seems unlikely to be full 5.1 It feels like anything other than mono could be called "multichannel" like it's stereo or 2.1 therefore its "multichannel".

STOP FEEDING THE TROLLS!

other points:
deets = stupid
official release date = good

I agree with some of the defenders of Sony. The advertisment is most like not that offensive /where it was printed/. While us crazy Americans see racism everywhere, apparently some European countries do not. That being said, of course it would be a bad idea for Sony to copy that ad here.
But no corporation is stupid in their advertising, ads don't just get spit out and printed willy-nilly after all these things cost major bucks, so you got to believe there are tons of approvals, focus groups and the like.
About the ad itself, I think what sony is going for is a sense of dichotomy, to get people riled up enough to defend one or the other. This would encourage them to think along the lines of "do I want the black or white PSP?" rather than "do I want a PSP or DS?". With the first question, it's a win-win for sony. I bet that Coke was thinking along the same lines for the New Coke product, by getting people 'for' one or the other, they will disregard other companies' offerings. So having dueling PSPs isn't such a stupid marketing idea after all.