MS has completely dropped the ball on Kinect press.  You always want to control the message and right now the press and gamers are way ahead of them on the message and now MS is forced to respond to questions they should have already answered.  Seriously someone should lose their job over the way this E3 was run, price is always the most important message you need to get across to your consumer. 

That may be when they'll announce the price to the public, but it's quite clear that retailers have been given some information from Microsoft regarding the price.  GameStop, Amazon, Best Buy, and Wal-mart all have it listed as $149.99:

http://www.gamestop.com/Catalog/ProductDetails.aspx?sku=020055&loc=ntlalone
http://www.amazon.com/Kinect-Xbox-360/dp/B002BSA298/ref=sr_tr_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1276779650&sr=8-1
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Microsoft - Kinect for Xbox 360/1036858.p?id=1218212157998&skuId=1036858&st=kinect&cp=1&lp=1
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Project-Natal-Xbox-360-Xbox-360/13378144

And these figures match up perfectly with the pricing given to Edge and MCV by industry sources last month (including $299 Arcade bundle):

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=110169&page=1

@MM476 the fact that the numbers are out, on several sites etc doesn't actually prove them to be correct. I follow the wonderful world of semi-conductor technology speculation and the sheer quantity of mis-information is incredible and much of that is deliberately laid by the respective companies to fool the competition.

For instance the RV700 GPU was originally rumoured to have 480 stream processors from 'trusted sources' then it was '640' until finally at the very last minute was it revealed that it infact had 800! The same also applied to Fermi, the latest Nvidia GPU and also to the latest AMD GPUs. Is Southern Islands before Northern Islands?!? Or is it the other way around? Are they releasing updates to their Fusion GPU first? Are they doing a pipe cleaning 28nm Cypress or is that a lie? ETC.

That is all speculative, a few weeks ago all the euro game sites were posting the 180 dollar figure.

Actualy both 149 and 179 dollars prices can be correct.

149 for only Natal, 179 bundle with game.

Those prices were posted by various Swedish and Norwegian websites, in SEK.  That doesn't provide for an accurate price comparison with US pricing or US chains, plus Eastern European retailers are more prone to posting speculative and inaccurate product listings than US retailers, for example the German stores that still list Tales of Vesperia and the Last Remnant for ps3. 

The same cannot be said for US retailers, who are not known for making up prices.  Generally, US retailers won't list a product at all without recieving some word from the manufacturer or publisher.  For every major retailer in the US to list the exact same pricing for Kinect, it's unlikely they are incorrect.  Could the pricing be changed later?  Certainly, but as it stands now, these are probably the figures they recieved straight from Microsoft.

Rumors about final hardware specs have little bearing on the topic at hand.  I doubt you'll ever see US retailers listing suppose specs for a product based off of internet rumblings.  If such specs are still up in the air, I doubt any stores would have the product listed at all.  We're well past that stage with Kinect.

I could be wrong but I suspect that Microsoft may be using the next couple of months to track interest before they settle on a price. If interest is high, and they believe they can have a good launch regardless of the price, I would expect Microsoft to announce the price at a very high level and to make a substantial profit on each unit sold; in contrast, if they discover that people’s intention to buy is small or is very price sensitive they might take a loss on each unit sold to try to prevent it from failing.

not releasing pricing maintains a certain hum about the product.  even by those who arent all that interested.

We're also before the stage where these stores actually need to know the price. Im not going to nail down a $149 price point before actual confirmation. It doesn't make sense for instance that the Xbox 360 redesign and price wasn't leaked until a day or two before E3 whereas Natals price was apparantly leaked well ahead of its actual release to market. The difference between a few days and months in advance is staggering.

Given the fact that Microsoft obviously knows how to keep a secret in the leaky games industry almost as well as Nintendo can is enough reason in itself to question the prices posted on those sites. So even if Microsoft told them a price, does that mean its the final price? Right at this moment Sony has given away their price but Microsoft is keeping theirs close to the chest. Why would they release the price to retailers, have it leaked and then insult our intelligence by not confirming what we 'already know' until August?

Btw some very reputable tech sites got egg on their face regarding the final specifications of the HD 4870/4850.

And it is possible the two bundled in games will be the Kinect Sports and the Kinect Adventures game.  Both of which are to directly compete with the Wii and show off the system.