This right here.
Gamers were burnt by SEGA's past consoles and SONY's hype machine was running on all cylinders.
SONY was promising Toy Story level graphic and all sorts of nonsense with their "emotion engine".
It was a surprisingly powerful system at the time and it took developers years to understand it well enough to take full advantage of the hardware. But the ability to have 2 CPUs run simultaneously and interact with each other allowed for A LOT of crazy optimizations that I haven't seen since.