I don't disagree with pwthornton, but I'd also point out Sony has a
looooong history of hype-hype-hyping the heck out of their hardware, far beyond its actual capabilities. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest they ship "ray tracing" capabilities that work on one launch game, and every other (serious) game developer takes one look at and says "no thanks, the 'conventional' pipeline for me, thanks" because in their rush to get it in there and get it shipping it'll have some critical oversight that renders it nowhere near as useful as it could have been. (For instance, not having enough bandwidth to and from the raytracing elements to be able to keep up or something like that, or if you use that mode it turns off too many other useful features so that nobody ever really uses it, for example, if you can raytrace but then architecturally have no practical way to post-process the image because it's all set up to be shoveled straight to the display, few game developers may find it that appealing.)
I still run into about one person a year on the internet who still can't understand why we're not all running Cell processors in our desktops, or who still thinks the PS3 has never had its power "fully unlocked", the answer being Sony hyped them well beyond what the tech could actually handle. In the end, it was merely about the level of hardware we'd expect for that amount of money at that time in a console, and was somewhat ahead of the XBox 360 in some ways and somewhat behind in others, not some sort of massive cutting edge next step thing that nobody caught up to for years.
I'd say take Sony's claims with a grain of salt, but that's probably not strong enough; do something more like divide everything they say by 4 or 5 and you're probably getting closer to the truth.