What makes it special? What makes Xbox Live worth it?

[dahuman]

Reasonable said:
I wouldn't say it's special as such but what makes it good is the tight level of integration between community/games/content it offers. In truth cross game chat is the only real USP it has functionally vs PSN so far as I can tell - but the OS for the console and how it integrates is a bit better and slicker. Online play itself is identical. Downloads and patching is neater with Live though.

It's also not really that expensive - although I think Silver should get access to more than they do in terms of non-gaming non MS centric stuff.

I tempered with the Metro UI on my friend's 360, I really really don't like it, but some of you already know that I'm a hater of the Metro UI since it's super ugly, a fair comparison is the PS3 and XMB is much faster to get to things with and you don't have a box dedicated to ads, I just want something that's clean and fast. You can do background downloads on PS3 as well, and background patching with cloud storage with PSN+, not that I'd pay for that either since it's hardly worth it IMO as well, I generally just backup my saves elsewhere.