I think at the time he made the right choice. If i was him price would not of worried me as much as the latency issue. Especially after seeing that HALF LIFE 2 demo.
natal will be good as long as developers don't go releasing ever genre out there for it. They need to focus on simple games for casuals and behind doors experiment on other genres and not rush them out. If they don't turn out no one needs to know about it.
This happened on the Wii. EVERYONE went for the motion controls when some games NEED to still use classic controls in my honest opinion.