Am I seriously one of the few PS3 users who hasn't had any real issues with Skyrim?
Patch 1.2 seems to have eliminated most of my frame rate issues, the occasional stutter happens on my character saves created before the patch but it's no where near as bad as it was before, and those I created after seem to run even more smoothly. It's not perfect, but it's better than it was.
Try cleaning up your hard-drives perhaps? Mine has quite a fair bit of space free, but I was having trouble with numerous other games when it was almost full.
Doubt it, but those who do have issues are just more likely to be around here while those that don't have issues will either be playing the game or had no major gripes with it to come here to complain about. After most major issues are sorted this forums will calm down and by this time next year people will be remembering Skyrim as a winner... then Bethesda will announce fallout 4 or something else and it'll be the same thing again.
Usually it hits the PC more then the consoles but this time, it's clear that there are issues that should have been found in testing for the PS3 too, I suspect it's because Bethesda sees the X-Box as it's major target console since their games sell better in NA and EU where the X-Box is the essentially the predominate gaming console.