In januari and february when the XO sales started to drop and availability was getting bigger then the demand. The question arose why those XO's didn't got shipped towards the T2 countries for a earlier launch. Back then and I still do believe they didn't because of the localisation of the Kinect for all languages. I suspect the just accounced bundle, aside from the sales dropping off, had another reason.

Getting kinect to work with all different languages of the T2 countries probably didn't work out, luckily menus are easily translated.
The kinect less sku will allow the younger kids to play with the XO and don't feeldisappointed when they can't give commands in their own tongue.

And those that can speak english can still get the SKU with kinect.

This would actually go a long way in tier 2 countries where there is little to no benefit of having kinect. I was worried people would be really turned off to paying more for something that wouldn't apply but now September will be that much more of a global boost when X1 releases in those 2 dozen+ countries.

Yea, Could be. MS might have been having a hard time getting all those languages to work well with kinect

So they opted for kinectless to help drive sales.

Great move from them at the end of the day.

Yeah, they probably already decided to remove Kinect and then had to prep the back-end to properly support that. This makes sense to do it all at the same time /before Tier 2 countries launch.

I'm sure it was a contributing factor, but i doubt it played a huge roll. The T2 countries really aren't particularly important to MS, they made up a rather small % of the 360's player base (i can't remember the specific figure, but there was a discussion about it here at some point). Not to mention anyone in those countries can already import it from places like the UK.

I think the not great sales was the main reason for the removal of the kinect.

No, Kinect will be fully functional on every T2 country.

Price was the main reason, along with the lack of developers support. Those who would make Kinect games have moved to phone/tablets and few who left are embracing VR.

Hardcore gamers have won.

functional and fully localized to respond to vocal commands for each of those languages?

Yes... unless Kinect is not put on sale on those countries.

They can´t sell a thing that dosen´t work as advertised.

Doubt this had any significance, those countries had a very small % of 360 sales last gen and in addition this gen PS4 already launched in most of them and they lost the huge price advantage from last gen so Microsoft knows this gen the % will probably be even lower with X1.