There were cheaper players by LG and Philips at the time, but more importantly the PS3 was the fastest to boot up and play a Blu-ray disc. Boot to playback times on 2006-era standalone Blu-ray players were abysmal, anywhere between 2 to 3 minutes.
What really hurt adoption in the early days was the Blu-ray versus HD DVD format war, not the players' startup performance. Consumers just sat it out and stuck with DVD, which still looked pretty good with upscaling players and anamorphic movies having become the norm.
Blu-ray has been a successful format, not at all like what happened to LaserDisc. Given the increase in the speed, reliability, and availability of broadband over the last decade (hence streaming) plus the aforementioned acceptability of DVD, Blu-ray's window of opportunity and overall potential were considerably narrower and more limited than DVD's.
