PS2 Emulation A Sure Thing?

In a recent interview with Arstechnica, John Koller, Sony’s director of hardware marketing, participated in a Q&A on the new PS3 Slim. In commenting on backwards compatability he stated “It’s not coming back, so let me put that on the table”. This made me begin to speculate on if he was specifically just referring to compatability at the hardware level.

The reason for this is assumption is that in December 2008 Sony filed a patent for PS Emulation via the Cell processor according to Siliconera. It would appear that while it’s off the table as being hardware embedded, it’s very much alive in the emulation space. Sony has always lead the way from a technical standpoint, and I wonder if this was part of the 10 year life-cycle plan when the Cell was decided to be the CPU of choice.