Yeah, neither is good for PS3 owners, that's not in question here, but there is a big difference between being bricked and not.
From wikipedia:
"In one common sense of the term, "bricking" suggests that the damage, often a misconfiguration of essential on-board software, is so serious as to have rendered the device _permanently_ unusable."
There is, usually, no such thing as _permanently_ unusable. 99% of the time a bricked device can be recovered by reflashing a working FW through JTAG or equivalent. This needs a piece of equipment to do so, but so does online or USB flashing...
