Had exactly this problem when we bought a PS3 a few weeks back, fired it up, the missus wanted to play Little Big Planet. 23 (TWENTY THREE) updates and 6hrs later the game finally came to life. No idea where the servers are (Tibet?) but it seemed to be running at the same speed as my AOL 56k account back in 1998. Such a poor system, it can't even do it in the background so you are left with a useless black box for hours.
Also bought Uncharted 2, despite being well ventilated/free of obstruction the darn thing sounds like a 747 at full throttle after 10 minutes playing it.
We put it in the bedroom so we had a Blu-Ray player for 'films to fall asleep to' (we never make it through a whole film at night), I thought it would be great for some cheeky gaming when the missus falls asleep as she usually turns in quite a bit before me. However, the 747 taking off next to the TV kinda put the brakes on that idea.
It's not been switched on for two weeks.