It doesn't matter how much money they make on the product, giving something for nearly half-off for a brand new (hopefully) popular product is a bad move for a business.  They'd attract a lot of people, but I'm assuming they're planning on selling whatever stock they receive whether they give you 40% off or a $10 gift card. 

The grasping for straws bit comes from just trying to come up for any reasons for why Kinect could fail.  Whether that's your goal or not, that's just what it sounds like.

Usually the margins on peripherals are higher for retailers than they are for say, consoles or software.

But definitely not the $60 per unit TRU would have been losing had they chose to honor those pre-orders, error or no.

Can't say I'm surprised, but it does mean I'm once again skipping Kinect until a decent bundle, or a decent price and a must play game hits shelves.

at least you get a 10$ coupon...

I still had my amazon MH3 mega pack cancelled for nothing :x

That was because of GAME. They had exclusivity on that pack in the UK, so Amazon had no choice but to cancel the orders.

what a bunch of douchebags

This wasnt even remotely related against Kinect. I even precise that a low margin was common in the video game business. Retailers makes about 10$ off PS3s system... And between, cancelling orders is also a bad move (customer satisfaction and legal implication). Surely they are going to sell all their stock at full price. But, the error was already made, usually most companies would absorb it, but there was just too much to absorb because of the low margin on video game accessories. They would have done the exact same thing  if the error was on the PS move bundle :P.