Home automation: Controlling things like thermostats, appliances etc because the console is always at home and always plugged in to the network.

Distributed computing: Pushing content to mobile devices and pulling computing tasks as home to the console itself so for instance if you take pictures on your phone you can use the performance of the console to manipulate the media or say transcode video into other formats.

Media backups/home server: Have all your media on the consoles HDD with seamless over the cloud backups so you can access stored information anywhere and you have an assurance of having a backup. So the console can act as both a NAS and Cloud interface.

Education apps: Take advantage of the natural computing interface to teach children and adults and use the fact that the console itself is a trusted platform to 'prove' competency so when you learn something it can be meaningful to more than just yourself. So not only will you be able to say learn French, you can prove you learnt French so you can put it on your CV and if someone asks you for a certificate you can give it.

Improved media integration: Natural voice communication, meta searches etc to make it easier to find content you want to watch and play in 1080P high definition with better compression, H.265 promises twice the visual quality or half the bandwidth for the same quality but requires a lot more performance to use, final ratification January 2013.

Your internet connection is the limitng factor here. USA pays a much higher price for much slower internet.(I just thought this was relevant this next Xbox main market will probably be the US. Besides, didn't Sony buy Gaikai which supposedly has the best cloud technology out there?

Anyway half that stuff is uselss. In my home, I'm sure my air conditioning system is too old to communicate with anything. I'm sure as hell not upgrading it just so I can controlling via my Xbox....

About distirbuted computing....my smarthphones is pretty powerful and it keeps getting more powerful each year. Why do I need my Xbox to do this?

I'm not even going to comment on the education apps thing.

It depends on where you are and what your speed is for cable etc. The average speed is 6.6Mbps which puts you 12th in the world, hardly a bad place to be.

You don't have to replace the air conditioning unit itself the thermostat is what the console needs to talk to.

A quad core smartphone will absolutely eat its battery to perform as quickly as a single Jaguar core from AMD, the Xbox is rumoured to have 8 of them and a very powerful GPU on top. So if you're at home say surfing the net and you can get twice the battery life out of your phone that is pretty substantial.