The "Silver" version of PS3 will be better than the "Silver" version of LIVE.
Free On-Line Play
Free Audio/Video Chat
Pretty much EVERYTHING is free.
The Premium, will just have some additional features that will cost money.
To compete with some of LIVE's "premium" services.
Soon enough Phil will let us all know how they can improve the achievement system.
(I can only guess/speculate)
All of that is speculation though, as you know.
It doesn't matter what Sony has said, it's all open for change regardless.
Their "Basic" package could end up allowing barely anything, or a lot. There really is no way to know. Could be you have to live in a different area of "Home" in your little flat, while Premium subscribers have a nice condo in a beautiful villa. There is just no way to know.
Heck, it could be that you have free access to play and download, but it's rate limited on non-priority servers (first come, first server bandwidth). Whereas Premium users get faster rates, dedicated speeds, and thus better network performance (because they are paying for it).
The truth is that a free network that *isn't* 100% P2P is extremely unlikely. P2P could work great with a large user base, but that is resting the stability and performance of your network on its users, which is cheap and not at all "solid".
We'll see, but there is only one thing on Sony's mind, and that's making money, just like nearly every business. "Free" doesn't make them money, so unless they compensate for that by making money off the network in some way, all PSN users will be looking at fees one day. Maybe they'll make enough on micro-transactions to keep things free/cheap.
Just don't expect a "free" service that is making little to no money to be a priority for any business - those things usually come with the attitude "shut up and stop complaining, you aren't paying for this anyway."
However, Sony still has much to reveal to the public, and while I don't expect them to be beating LIVE in every way/shape/form anytime soon(or for a while for that matter), i do think Sony is creative enough to "1up" a few of the features offered in LIVE. MY first guess would be media content. MS is a software giant and has way more experience in the online realm, but Sony has way more content to offer out of the gates. Other features will come(Phil is dying to tell us about "achievements" but is holding back), but I think that will be the first PSN feature to better LIVE.
