I have no problem with Kinect. It's great for Skype, system voice commands, Twitch, etc. However, I do have a problem with it eating into the GPU budget for games.
Get Kinect away from games; it serves no purpose there in _any_ form. Keep it for system experiences like the above. Had the xbone came with identical hardware as the PS4 and been better about keeping Kinect away from the GPU, there would not be as many complaints about it even at $500.
A Kinect-less sku does nothing for gamers as the hardware is still going to put all multi-plat games at a disadvantage. Great, you get the system into more people's hands, but unless your get a direct cut from xbox sales, it doesn't matter. Even as a shareholder you won't notice an uptick in stock price that you can reasonably say was a result of a Kinect-less sku. In the end, you'll still be gimped by the hardware.
The best, probably impossible case would look like:
- Drop price slightly as the cost of goods has probably fallen by now
- Remove Kinect reservation from GPU. Declare motion games a failure, stop pushing Kinect for games at all, and never look back
- Keep Kinect but make it even better; notably for other locales/markets
- Ship an improved SDK which helps squeeze the hardware further
- With the current small game library (for re-certification) and a very large box for heat control, go ahead and ship a firmware update bumping the GPU and CPU clocks further. Disregard the memory bottleneck; creative devs in the future will find ways to use it.
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