Official pricecuts will be coming soon.

I don't get how this confirms what Pachter said. So this article and Pachter are telling me that Target, Amazon, Walmart, and a ton of other retailers (not to mention the ones in Europe) just happened to decide that they all needed the same price cut during the same exact time period? That's a hell of a coincidence. It's especially odd that those retailers didn't implement the pricecuts in January, during the worse sales month for the Xbox One or the month after it. They instead waited until sale numbers were already high to cut the price. Yeahh... totally makes sense.

And considering the slim margin that retailers are making a profit on the consoles, I have a hard time seriously thinking they would even consider taking losses without any support from Microsoft.

What I suspect is that Microsoft was running a promotion where retailers could buy into a discount split. I used to see that offered a lot when I worked with distributors. Basically, the manufacturer and the retailer would split the loss in order to mark the product down for a limited amount of time. The offer would be something like, "you order X amount of units and we'll give you a substantial discount but you have to agree to lower your list price by at least X percentage until the promotion is over."

Discounts temporary until E3 when MS will drop the price to $399.

No this is what happened...Anyone who works in management for a major retailer will tell you why.
A large stock of xboxs were sold to major retailers intially such as walmart bestbuy and target. However these store managers over estimated how much the XB1 was going to sell. Once they realized sales were not going to be strong...they needto clear out their inventory on hand ...hence the markdown sales. Any half intelligent big box store manager knows when to stop buying a product that isn't selling, because and he also knows that loosing 50 bucks to clear an xbox unit is worth it when you can use the shelf space or just show less on your inventory. The exact same thing happened with gamecube and wii U...retailers with stuff with that crappy things.

when corporate knows a certain product isn't selling the way it should...expect them to cut their losses while they can to streamline nationwide inventory.

Yea, I just looked it up and that is the case. My bad. My understanding before was that a rollback was a price drop (as I haven't seen products go back up in price before) as opposed to being "on sale". If that's the case, I dunno why they had to make it "official" then, a week or so after it initially dropped to $450 (the phrasing was either a post I saw here or at my local walmart) 

The overstock and overproduction of XB1 has been a disaster thus far. This kind of thing is an expensive mistake that harms retailer relations and makes for bad PR. Customers are less likely to want to buy at a perceived price hike on something not very popular either.

Big price cut at E3 or they're dead in USA.

they were also seeing how people would react to the lower price since chances are they will announce a price cut at e3

no-one tests water with a price cut for.... a price cut.

More likely someone higher up at MS told the xbox division not to sit on so much stock. And/or maybe they had titanfall targets to achieve which they otherwise wouldnt have made.

This is gonna mess up everyones sales predictions who was took into account sales during the promotional period.
2:1 ratio might still be on the table for this year.

Testing the waters isn't the phrase I would use. You can't exactly announce an "official" price cut when the price of the product at retail is already at that price cut.