In this thread, people saying 'oh, who cares, we just wanna play' have missed the point of the thread. The OP asked 'why do people say xbl is better than psn?'
It's not a question of 'does psn suit your individual needs better'. XBL is a far better service, with a lot more effort obviously gone into the development. It offers heaps more content than the PSN store, which you'd realise if you logged on and look. I've got both, so I'm not talking from a biased point of view. The cost of it, really isn't too much, I got my 13 month subscription for $51. That's less than a $1 a week, so you can't really complain about the cost of it.
As previously mentioned, a big advantage that XBL offers is standardisation across ALL titles. That's something that Sony is seriously struggling to keep up with at the moment. Yeah, PSN is free - only because they want people to use their service rather than Microsoft's. The extra 'money' people pay for the XBL service doesn't provide MS with some magic ability to design a better service because they get money for it. Sony just need to pick up their game, and they should have been thinking about the 'future features' before they launched in the first place.
Skua, the majority you speak of - if it actually existed - would be prevalent on both brands of console.. so saying 'psn should have a worse service because most of us just wanna game and dont wanna use extra features' doesn't really apply.