Like I said, I must be confusing him with someone else then :-S  My bad!

I guess the argument would be, even if you were right why would it matter?  If we just ignore everyone's view if they have some kind of bias we would have to ignore Maxwell's impressions, your impressions, every forum goers impressions would be ignored because we all have biases one way or another.  It's a crappy argument to make even if you were right about Maxwell.

No, everything I hear in general.  Lag, recognition, shovelware, space... the space issue is a total deal breaker for my setup, so unless that changes I won't have much choice but to forego Kinect. Hopefully all those cool sounding JP games have pad based alternative control schemes. :/

Yeah the space issue made the idea of buying Kinect for Dance Central go out the door, it's really the only game I want from the launch lineup but I simply don't have that kind of room, in my room, the living room, or at my friends place (different place from the one mentioned in the OP)

I feel that's a distinct feature they should have thought about before going into development, me and 3 other friends would cram into my 2 by 2 cell I used to call a room and play Wii, I can do the same with Move (to an extent some Move games require a little more space to track the ball), but with Kinect that just isn't happening.

I was mostly aiming it at Leo-J, since he has a much more obvious bias than most.

Still, the only reason I had mentioned it is because everyone's experiences and impressions are affected by their own personal bias.  I just didn't want people to assume that one person thinking it was laggy and putting emphasis on such would mean that everyone thinks that or that all games on Kinect are so unplayably laggy.

I admit there is a lag, but nothing that takes away from the experience in any way other than a few titles.  Most of the time it is no more than standard controller input lag or only slightly worse.

Shovelware is the same on Move and Wii.  Kinect's line-up is actually ranking above Move's on Meta so far.

Also, the recognition issues was only to do with Kinect ID features.  The motion tracking for games always works (at least for me and anyone that has tried it at my place it has) provided you have the space and no infrared device interfering.  Kinect ID (the feature that matches you with your avatar) only has issues with lots of sun light or poor lighting conditions because it relies heavily on the RGB camera for facial recognition.

I have had Kinect since Thursday, and my impressions are quite a bit different then yours, though I would guess it's a matter of perception rather than factual disagreement.

Specifically:

1. The lag inbetween your action and on-screen avatar varies by activity.  I would guess it's at it's worse in Reflex ridge, but I haven't found that game to be unplayable or in anyway adversely affected by the miniscule lag.  For example I have a 4 year old son who has no concept of "lag", and he can jump the obstacles with little or no difficulty.
2. Motion controls were not meant to replace standard controls on the dashboard, but rather used during your Kinect play sessions, where you wouldn't have a controller with you.  For example, you can turn on your system, then say "XBOX, Kinect", then "XBOX, Play Disc", then use your hands to pick which Kinect Adventure (or whatever) you want to play.  Having to use a controller to get to Kinect Adventures, just to turn it off would make little sense.  For these occassions, motion and voice controls work perfectly.
3. Finally regarding space, this seems to be pretty variable, though I hear mounting it higher gives you better results.  I don't have a huge room, and my kinect is mounted about 2 feet off the ground and we can play fine.  I've seen you tube videos of smaller spaces working though.

I've had a lot of fun with Kinect and am looking forward to picking up Kinect sports and Dance Central.  While Kinect might not be for everybody, there is definitely some fun to be had with it.

Even just looking at launch lineups, I felt Wii was like a thousand times better (Zelda TP, Excite Truck, Monkey Ball 3, Trauma Center, shit loads of Virtual Console classics) and even Move has some retrofits that interest me (RE5, Time Crisis RS).  As of now, there's literally no Kinect games I'm interested in even trying, metacritic or no.  I mean everyone has shovelware, but Kinect feels like the first launch where... well, there's nothing BUT shovelware.  That's going to change in the future though, which is why I sincerely hope MS can fix at least the "space problem" before then. :/

I wasn't interested in the Wii's launch lineup, but I'm not going to sit here and call it shovelware because of that.

I've found lag to be fairly consistent from game to game to game, you do the action and the game reacts a moment later, and it's for every game, it's different experiences for each game cause the lag will hurt one game more than the other, Reflex Ridge a game that requires reflexes and timed jumping lag will hurt more than Rally Ball, I brought Reflex Ridge up in the lag portion of my impressions for that specific purpose, its showing off a game that requires quicker timing and you can fuck up through no fault of your own, it will just jump after you physically jump which can lead to problems if you do whats natural which is jumping right before the obstacle.

I remember reading preview after preview that discussed the lag and how the hardware just has a 100ms lag because of how it works, that's going to be that consistent lag you see in every game, just about every review mentions lag in games, the only game this seems different from is Dance Central and you can clearly see the delayed reactions in free style, but again it's the type of game it is that helps them.  

Does that mean it's bad that they're doing their own work arounds? No, hardware has limitations, working around those limitations is just good design, which is why Dance Central is getting good scores and good reactions from people and just about everything else not so much.