It was kind of amazing.
And the reason that it was amazing is that it was futureproofed against a future that never existed.
You can see that in the hardware, where there was support for lots of memory card types because Sony didn't know which memory card would dominate. It turned out to be just USB storage plus SD and the PS3 would have been fine with none of those ports. The USB ports themselves were overkill, probably only a tiny fraction of PS3 owners ever had more than two things plugged in at the same time, but Sony were imagining people connecting tons of devices to the PS3 so they threw in four and did things like give it keyboard and mouse support on the XMB level and add printer support later.
You can see it with the XMB, a vision of the future, circa 2003 when the XMB first appeared, imagining a media universe divided neatly into music, pictures, videos and games, everything stored locally, all playback and additional features handled by the system itself. No such thing as an app. No way to perform multiple things at the same time, such as playing music in-game. There wasn't even in-game XMB until 2008.
You can see it in the amount of features the system has for media. Ripping CDs is the one that everyone brings up - it didn't just rip them, you could pick the format, pick the bitrate, and pick album art. You could group songs by genre and artist and year and add playlists, and the PS3 would look up the track listings so you didn't have to name them yourself. It does all this because Sony genuinely thought people would sit there listening to music on their PS3. The photo handler was beautiful - still one of the best-looking photo viewers ever created, with your photos mocked up to look like real photographs falling on to a scrolling timeline. It has a little photo physics simulator built in and it silently recognises faces and zooms in on them, because Sony genuinely thought people would sit there looking through years of photos on their PS3.
What's maybe even more amazing is that the actual PS3 that released was the result of someone in Sony looking at the original design and saying "that's too expensive, tone that down a bit". Look at what they originally wanted the back to look like:
Two HDMI ports. Another two USB ports.
Three ethernet ports, because they wanted it to be a router as well. If Kutaragi hadn't gone unchecked it'd probably have cost about twice what it actually launched for.