I'm fine with MS charging for Live; I don't know what this exceptional PSN service is that you mention, because all my friends with PS3s -and- 360s state unequivocally that XBL is the superior implementation. With Live's Party feature you can chat with a single friend, or a group of friends, all of whom may be playing different games. You can then take that Party and move it into a game of everyone's choosing. With PS3 you can't even get System BGM and voicechat going at the same time, can you? And there's no "let's take this into a game" feature, right?
What kills me though is that MS gives Live Messenger up for free on Windows (and Mac), supports text, voice, and video chat for free in them, but in the XBL implementation voicechat and videochat is only available for Gold, and if you have two people at one location who want to be in on the videochat, all the controllers with headsets have to be logged in with Gold accounts. If you log someone in with a Silver account while a videochat is in session, it will end the video chat.
In short, MS charging to support other people's stuff which is free on Windows doesn't bother me so much as not bringing their own free stuff to XBL, and not broadening Gold features to "anyone on this 360."
