Sir Howard Stringer just doesn’t seem to get it.

You’d think the Sony CEO, or anybody in that job, is deftly perceptive of public interaction with the gaming-hardware market. After all, his company’s PlayStation 3 mostly-for-gaming console has been locked in a consumer appreciation battle with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii since PS3’s birth two years ago. This is a big, hairy, sweaty battle, with lots of money and corporate prestige involved.

To date, Sony has come out on the short end of both. PS3 has finished third in quarterly sales against the other two consoles almost its whole existence. Only very recently has it begun gaining ground against Xbox 360. But both remain far behind Wii, which retailers constantly have trouble keeping in stock.

According to market researcher NPD Group, the Wii sold 2.8 million consoles through this May, compared to 1.2 million for PS3 and 1.12 million for Xbox 360.

Apparently, Stringer doesn’t see this as a problem. In fact, he doesn’t even consider Wii on the same playing field. And maybe that ought to worry the rest of the people at Sony.

Last week, during a conference in Idaho, Stringer went as far to say that Wii and PS3 aren’t even competitors — that Nintendo’s motion-sensitive system is “more of an expensive niche game device,” while PS3 is “still the best way to buy a Blu-ray player.”

A major reason for PS3’s sales boost came after the high-definition optical storage technology HD DVD was scrapped in February, giving rival technology Blu-ray control of the market. The end of HD DVD quashed consumers’ concerns that they might make the wrong choice too soon and wind up with obsolete technology.

Blu-ray player prices spiked upward subsequent to HD DVD’s demise — except for PS3, which remained at $400 per device, making it the least expensive Blu-ray player on the market.

Nice try, Mr. Stringer, bringing up the Blu-ray nudge. But that misses the point. It seems that nobody who bought a Wii cares about Blu-ray. These people are not content just sitting around watching movies; they also want to play interactive games that make them get up and stretch, bend, swing their arms and dance. And they like having all this interactivity for a comparatively low price: about $250 per Wii console. (Wii does not contain high-definition playback technology.)

Call any game retailer and they have plenty of “Metal Gear Solid 4″ for PS3 in stock, but only back orders for titles such as as “Wii Fit,” with its touch-sensitive peripheral balance board and wide variety of built-in active mini-games that encourage players to do much more than just work their thumbs.

Game developers certainly see where this trend is going, and that’s why they have reworked many popular Xbox and PS3 titles for use on Wii systems. That means any copy of, say, “Wall-E” bought for Wii instead of PS3 is money out of Sony’s pocket.

Stringer can sit on his hands and hope for time and gravity to work in his favor, but consumers enjoy innovation and tend to reward the companies that do as well with their loyalty — and their cash.

For his and Sony’s sake, Stringer better hope there’s some truth to the rumors that the new motion-sensitive controller Darwin is PS3-compatible. Otherwise, Wii won’t be just some “niche device,” it’ll be the reason he has to open his golden parachute.