Digital all the way. Physical is for people who sell their games regularly, share them, or collect them. None of that applies to me and the convenience of it trumps all. Plus sales are steady and regular for what I want.
Physical is for people who will want to go back and revisit game experiences 10+ years from now when many of those games are unlikely to be re-released ever. One of the systems I've started getting into recently is the Dreamcast. It has alot of gems and reminds me alot of the Gamecube. Some of those games have been re-released and some have not. Since Dreamcast is a physical format it's easy (if costly) to track down all the games available for it. Had it been a digital only console the only way I could get games for it would be to track down a dreamcast that had it downloaded to it and the owner was willing to part with their account info on the machine. That or emulate which I strongly prefer not to do.
Physical is also for people who care about replicating the initial experience. I'm thinking of Donkey Konga/beats series. The bongos are very unlikely to ever be re-released for any future Nintendo console. As such, the game can be re-released but it won't have the same features and won't give the user the same experience in the future.
They are the only side with something to lose (more to the point, something that almost certainly will be lost eventually).
In the extreme, I'm going to die and nothing I have on earth will come with me. To a lesser extreme, it may be difficult to find a working Gamecube in 25-30 years from now making physical games difficult to play. To me, I'm still think that's a better alternative to digital which will most likely not make it that long.
But I do disagree with the point in general. When great games are no longer playable on any format, all gamers lose. The digital generation may not know what is lost yet, or care that it's lost initially but I think alot of those gamers will eventually miss games that they enjoyed that they can no longer play. When I was in college, I bought/played/sold everything. At one point I had purchased >100 Gamecube games but owned <5. I was a machine at getting rid of them quickly to recover as much of the original cost as possible (obviously money was tight). 7/8 years after getting rid of many of those games (and not thinking twice when I did) I began to miss the experience that many of those games brought me and my friends (many of who will play Gamecube games with me but have no desire to pick up new systems). Those games define a time in my life and experiences that I (and my friends) can easily go back and experience and have a great time. I guess I've reached a point in my life where I feel new games are not necessarily better than old games and having the old games available is important. If there was a future (other than emulation) that all games could be reproduced digitally than I would probably be less concerned about physical/digital debate.
On handhelds, what I've started doing is either buying games on sale - Atlus is quite good at this - or using retail discounts to make sure I *want* to keep a game, then I'll buy it digitally and trade it for what I've paid after I move the save over. I can usually get close to what I paid for it. (Example: I bought SMTIV on launch day for $33, bought the eShop version a couple of weeks ago for $30, and traded the physical in for $19. Net cost: $42.)
I don't want to be rude, but I'm kind of dumbfounded by your example. You "waited" for a digital sale, but ended up having more money in the digital copy than if you bought day 1 digital. The only way your system is financially better is if it assumes that you sell all physical copies and don't convert them to digital (at a loss) very often because you don't want to "keep" the game. But then again, the opportunity to sell if you don't want a game is one of the big pluses you'll be losing in the future since digital doesn't allow you the option to see if you want to "keep" the game. So it seems to me that you like having both physical/digital available and deciding (based on your preferences) which format to choose for each game.
The storage solution isn't so bad for Nintendo people since they use existing standards - USB hard drives and SD cards. I paid $5 for a Y cable to use a little 500GB pocket drive I picked up a few years back for my WiiU, and I got a 64GB SD card on sale for $40 for Boxing Day. I'm about to drop $110 on a similar sized card for my Vita and will be doing it with teeth gritted so hard they'll snap in half.
Comparing Nintendo's crappy solution to a worse solution doesn't make it better. Proprietary hardware always sucks and should be scrapped. PS3 is the gold standard. Simply plug in a laptop hard drive. No secondary power supply to power to have (or Y cable using up both of your USB ports so you can't charge a pro controller). No planning to figure out how to either hide the additional box or make it fit in a stand. Cheapest prices available. It's been awhile since I've looked, but I'm sure I've seen 1 TB drives for <$60. Not withstanding, most people have had laptops before, it's usually easy to find a drive and re-purpose it to the PS3 for a net cost of $0 (which is what I did). It just seems silly to me. Nintendo wants to be the cheapest but hidden costs like this negate the cheap factor (except for low powered hardware which you'll still have).
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