First of all I'd like to first say that I'm a PS3 owner.
There's literally no better console coz it depends on what perspective you are talking about.
If its hardware wise the Xbox 360 has clearly much more balanced hardware and thus 'better' hardware.
The PS3 on the other hand is a bit bottlenecked by its GPU which translates into lower framerates, native resolutions and graphics. The PS3 really has a much more powerful CPU (which is over-rated btw), has a Blu-Ray drive but as I said the GPU is not on par with these and is proving to be a limiting factor.
Games on the Xbox 360 in fact nearly always have better and denser graphics and colours, better framerates, higher raw resolutions (rarely) etc... This is partly also due to the fact that developing games for the 360 is much easier therefore developers tend to get more juice out of it.
If its online gaming I'd also go with the Xbox 360. Xbox live clearly pwns PSN (especially now with the recent hacking scandal).
The most important criteria for me is however what games there are for each console. With the amount of exclusive games that there are on the PS3 I'd have to say that the PS3 is a much better experience!
PS3 exclusive games which are a must: Metal Gear Solid 4, God of War 3, Little Big Planet 1&2, Uncharted 1&2, Heavy Rain, Resistance 1&2, Motorstorm 2, Killzone, inFamous etc... (Most of these games are programmed by SCEE)
Anyway, you cannot really go wrong with ANY console (except the Wii) so don't worry too much about it...