It is still a shitty design choice by Sony that after you've downloaded the game, if there is a patch, it's basically like downloading the whole game again and then installing it again. That's pretty silly.
While I agree, there have been plenty of XBLA/Steam games that I've downloaded and then had patches to install right after. That's not something that is exclusive to Sony. It just sucks that if the connection was slow to download the game, it's just as bad downloading the patch.
But you don't then also have to sit through a reinstall of the game, it patches and thats it and they also update the file so that if you ever had to reinstall from scratch you aren't downloading the game and then 7 patches after that. If ps3 does that too, I don't know. Doesn't seem like it from what I've seen or heard.