Why is everything so complicated on PS3? On 360, the patch was downloaded and applied in something like 5 seconds. No problems whatsoever so far. Didn`t even notice a difference while playing. What was the purpose of this patch on 360? Glitch fixes??

I don't know that it's complicated. I just found that when I tried to download the patch as soon as the game was loading before the "this game saves automatically" screen showed up, it would restart my console. Probably had something to do with the game accessing the HDD while the download was trying to as well. So I just waited with the "the latest patch is available" screen up until I heard the sound when the other notification pops up, looked to see that the HDD wasn't being accessed, then clicked ok to dl the patch and it worked fine.

As for the new manual save file and waiting 73 in game hours, that's actually for every platform. It is a recommendation that Bethesda made to make sure no issues pop up. I heard of one person, after dl'ing the patch, couldn't do anything because he kept falling through the floor and dying. So I guess that the manual save file and the wait helps with things like that.

And finally, for the wait, I just discovered the cool trick so it will make 73 in game hours go by MUCH quicker. It's not necessary in any way, just a cool trick.

I was experiencing serious issues before the patch, but after about 2 hours post-patch, it seems to be running pretty smoothly. I'm fairly optimistic.

Hmmm...I'm the opposite. The worst issue I ever had before was a slight delay when bringing up the cross-menu. After the patch last night:
-I started getting huge delays when trying to search corpses.
-In one fight it ignored my shout inputs...I kept hitting R2 and had a full charge but it wouldn't fire for several seconds (and well after my opponent was already dead)
-I got my first ever total lockup

All this happened on the "Ill By Moonlight" quest where I was helping Sinding kill the hunters. I didn't play much else.

Is it the quest or the patch? Again I've never had issues like this before...

I've been a big defender of Skyrim on PS3, at least relative to the other versions (though I'm always a big critic of Bethesda's poor QA). For me, though, this patch appears to have really f***ed it up. Hopefully it was just a freak thing.