> - How good is the BD-Rom player? (compared to, say, a dedicated one)

Excellent, exceeds the quality of many of the standalone players through HDMI last I'd heard, also one of the only early players that was able to be upgraded to current spec just with system firmware updates

> - Are games region-protected?

PS3 games are not, but backwards compatability-supported games and DVDs still are

> - Does it run PS2 games or not? (interested mostly in the Katamari series)

If you can find an old 60GB (NA/Japan) PS3, then PS2 compatability is nearly perfect. 80GB and Euro models have partial backwards compatability, and the newest models have none

> - Does it run PS1 games?

Yes!

> - Any advice / other interesting stuff about it?

It has a lot of media center functionality, and is nowhere near as locked-down in terms of peripherals and homebrew as e.g. the X360

-nZero