Question should rather be.......if not for those exclusives where would MSFT be.....and the answer probably involves a creek and a lack of a paddle.

EA has carried Microsoft through the launch. Microsoft paid up and thats all there is to it. Microsoft cant compete with Sony in europe and they had no games ready.Timed exclusivity on  Plants vs Zombies, exclusivity of Titanfall, Fifa exclusive items and madden exclusive items? I mean seriously Microsoft is purely dependent. EA doesn't need them, but they wont turn down money, especially when they expected Microsoft to beat Sony and that didnt happen. EA bet on the wrong horse.

We do know the story. It came out after E3. That guy who was working for Microsoft who pissed off everyone by arguing with the fans about DRM didnt help either. Microsoft didn't think about their fans at all. Once Microsoft put the DRM EA dropped the DRM on their console. Once they realized after E3 that fans hated it, they kept it off since Sony pretty much was in gamers good graces.

Looks like quite a bit of the "one billion for games" went straight to EA. The more PS4 sells, the more it's going to cost Microsoft to get exclusive games and DLC. Eventually the cost will outstrip the advantages.

I wonder how much MS would pay EA to make their sports games (Madden NFL, FIFA, NHL, etc.) come out 1 month earlier on the X1 versus the PS4.

I remember that being a rumour.  The price was probably too high.

I think that timed exclusives create more negative reactions* from players who lost out than positive reactions from players who got the content but knew they would get it anyway even if there wasnt an exclusive deal in place.

*reactions towards the company paying for timed exclusivity, not the content.

On top of that, when timed exclusives go multiplatform it becomes yet another negative point in the form of 'ha ha, 'console X' lost an exclusive'. But no-one really says 'ha ha, you played it 3 months late'.
Mass effect is a classic example (even though it wasnt a proper exclusive...imagine if it were?)

In conclusion, I do not believe timed exclusive adds value to a console. It actually makes one keep questioning whether a real third party exclusive may actually only be timed and also takes value away from that too.

No they didnt.  They said they made the deal using forcasts.  That doesnt mean they were forcasting that the xbox was going to sell more, just that the money they asked from microsoft was based on their forcasted sales.  If anything, their statement means they thought the x1 would sell less, since they are still happy with their deal.

EA may be questioning if it was worth doing this, but Titanfall may do well enough to keep them happy

Forecast could mean the system where the 1st person shooter sells the most. Based on that and assuming MS talked to them 1st about the DRM and EA liking it they wanted to help the Xbox more than PS