Everyone is scoring this fight on the wrong board. The trade press counts standalone players shipped and discs available at retail, both of which are close enough that you can write whichever story you prefer this week.
Count the drives instead.
Sony put a Blu-ray drive inside the PlayStation 3. Not as an option, not as an add-on, in every single unit. Microsoft made its HD DVD drive a separate box you buy afterwards for around two hundred dollars and plug into the side of a 360.
Those two decisions are the format war. Everything else is commentary.
A person who buys a PS3 to play games has bought a Blu-ray player whether they wanted one or not. They did not compare formats. They did not read a buying guide. They may not know the machine does it. But the drive is in the house, and the first time a film they want is on the shelf in that format, the decision has already been made for them.
A person who buys a 360 has to want HD DVD enough to make a second purchase, at a second price, with a second cable and a second box on the shelf. Almost nobody does that. The attachment rate on the add-on is, by every account I have seen, dismal, and Microsoft has not been eager to publish it.
So Sony is putting hardware into homes at a rate no player manufacturer can approach, and doing it while the buyer is thinking about something else entirely. The PS3 is expensive and it is selling slowly compared to what Sony hoped, and it is still shipping more Blu-ray drives per month than the entire standalone player market in both formats combined.
I do not think this was a masterstroke of strategy so much as Sony being Sony. The company has always tried to attach a format to its hardware, and it has usually lost. Betamax lost. MiniDisc lost outside Japan. Memory Stick is losing right now to a card format nobody owns. The pattern is that Sony builds the better thing, insists on controlling it, and gets beaten by something more open.
This time the format happens to be riding inside a games console that people have an independent reason to buy, and that changes the arithmetic completely.
Which is why I think this ends in a boardroom rather than at a checkout. Consumers are not going to resolve it, because most of them have sensibly refused to participate and are waiting it out with an upscaling DVD player. It ends when a studio currently supporting both formats, or one committed to HD DVD, looks at the installed base of drives, decides the arithmetic is settled, and switches.
The day that happens the war will be reported as having ended suddenly. It will have been over for about a year.