. [Kazunori Yamauchi's] reply was that the game was only three days late from their side, and that Sony has to decide what that means for the release.  

Like I said it is manufacturing issues. I had it confirmed today.

   The problem arose when SCE mandated SDK 350 on all games releasing after after October, GT5 was about to go gold running on SDK 341, but it has been delayed by around a week so that they can update to SDK 350. This has caused a big headache for the manufacturing side, given how big this game is missing the gold date by even a week can cause a months worth of delay as slots are already taken up at this time of year for Blu-ray movies and such. So Sony had to find a 3 week slot big enough to make 7m+ copies of this and get them shipped out.

   If you want to blame anyone, I would direct it at the pirates and hackers, SCE never had any real SDK restrictions before firmware 3.41 was compromised.