Before we all jump at Sony for the delay in shutdown, it maybe helpful understanding the Android shutdown mechanism. The shutdown is an Android operating system call.
However, you can provide delays in the shutdown process to allow your apps to be shutdown properly and your SD card to be unmounted safely before powerdown. But you can also do a quick force shutdown. ( this is very similar to Linux). So if you do force shutdown (which will obviously shutdown very quick) often, then likelyhood of filesystem corruptions is higher. If you allow the running apps to "gracefully" shutdown and then safely unmount the SD card, it might take longer time to shutdown, but safer for the filesystem.
I am not saying the long delay now is okay, but I would rather leave it to the Sony developers to determine the appropriate delay. Considering that shutdown is not something done very frequently, I would rather have a delayed shutdown rather than a corrupted filesystem.
btw, I thought comparatively Sony has fewer "Bloatware" compared to other manufacturers - except Google that is..
