You actually have a good point on the kinect centric games... where are they?  Why do I need kinect other than to say xbox on, skype, fantasy football, etc.  At the end of the day, it appears microsoft is trying to make the consumer eat the cost of it.  Might be a smart decision at the end of the day.

Sell out a launch bundle at 500, calling it a "launch edition" then sell a 400 sku later on once the initial rush has died down.  Why let ebayers make all the money? Could be bad PR though if they drop the price too quickly after launch.

In other words, maybe Sony is leaving money on the table with their system.

And this is how silly rumours start, essentially.....

Care to tell us where you got the "The CPU is significantly larger" nonsense from?

"as is the number of co processors": When did dma controlers suddenly turn into "processors"? Of course MS needed a lot of secondary stuff on their SoC, it is not like the esram works on its own, and noise cancellation mics and speech recognition require "expensive" hardware, or "co-processors" in MS's words.

"development of DirectX 11.2 over it's competitors" - Yikes, MS owns directX, it is THEIR driver for WndowsX, there is NO competitor developing directX. Fortunately the competition doesn't really care about directX at all, since they have their own drivers to take care of (which, as an added bonus, can work much closer to hardware if they chose so).

So None of it "is lost as it whooshes over people's heads", because the competitiors just don't bother about what MS is doing, they try to solve their own problems instead. While we get daily (almost hourly) updates from some MS pr guy on just how great their console is, the competitor just quietly trundles along, This should give you a good idea about who is in a better position right now.

GPU acceleration has existed for many years so I still don't understand the big deal microsoft is making.

This. They have their own patent about it, just like AMD, Intel, NVidia, and many others have theirs. Maybe they are very confident about having integrated this feature in their drivers and libraries.

About the secret sauce, they tried to use it to cool the system, but it short-circuited it, so they switched back to air cooling and they recommend plain old ethylen glycol to modders.   

The games are where 2.0 version of Kinect is supposed to show up.  There is some mix with regular TV, but $500 for an enhancement to regular TV, plus a Gold membership?  With tax that is like $600 or more.  So, I will say the games matter.  And I am not seeing early adopters excited about it.  This thread is the extent of the reasoning on it:

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=168512&page=1

I do wish there was more.

Right now I am finding it hard to justify the 100 premium over PS4.  Of course, I will eventually own all the systems Xbox and Wii U as well.  But they need to provide me something more to "jump in" so early.

Can anybody explain to me what video decoder/encoder have to do with GPU Acceleration for games???

Cuz you know, there is stuff you can do gpgpu style, depending on the codec protocol...

But if you use GPGPU style you need to share GPU resources with the graphic render engine... plus Xbone and PS4 have dedicated units for video encode/decoder.

So how use video encode/decoder on GPU can increase the game performance? How that can be Secret Sauce?