For several years now Sony has been proclaiming PlayStation 3 as a true entertainment hub at the centre of all digital entertainment in the home.

Yet last week I was puzzled to attend a Sony press conference in which the company espoused the virtues of another product designed to fulfill the exact same role, and sporting a price tag of $2399 - more than three times higher than PS3.

The Vaio TP2 might have a bigger built-in hard drive and let you run office applications, but who wants to do work on a living room PC? And PS3's gaming and multimedia capabilities are going to compare favourably to a PC with a Core 2 Duo T8100 processor and a GeForce 8400M video card.

Now that Blu-ray has won the high-definition format war and Play TV is on its way, I would have thought Sony as a company would be doing everything it could to promote PS3 as an essential piece of home entertainment gear for every home, not muddy the waters with a "living room PC" at a time when many other vendors have decided to pull out of the PC media centre market.

Perhaps Sony is just smarter than me and has simply released the Vaio TP2 to make the PS3 look like a bargain.