I'm pretty sure MS can rekindle some of the enthusiasm for their console it enjoyed leading up to it's reveal with a very good E3 showing.
Their last years conference already was great game wise, but the uncertainties surrounding their planed new DRM together with the $100 higher price tag and mandatory Kinect distracted people from their games line-up.

Why would I pre-order? What is the incentive?

stealthy?   the news was everywhere.

You can't say that when things sell out. Pre-ordering is not needed for games though, unless you were buying day 1 and want some exclusive dlc or something like that.

Stealthy was probably a poor choice of words. But E3 will definitely make more headlines and will more likely reach the casual audience.

i think the news is out.  i had a friend text me when he saw the news on slickdeals.net to laugh at the news.  he's a gamer but he doesn't keep up with news all that closely.  i'm generally telling him what games he should be looking into since we have very similar tastes in games.

Yeah the people around me who are gamers didn't know shit so I just assumed that while the news is out there, not everyone knows about it.

It was on every site, on every forum, on thousands of Youtube channels, on Facebook and Twitter. How is that 'stealthy'?

If the Titan Fall bundle at $450 didn't get a lot of people I don't think anything will. Then again that wasn't advertised so I guess that could have affected things by how much? I don't know.

As I said earlier, 3 posts before yours to be exact, stealthy was probably a poor choice of words. However, I have friends that are gamers who didn't know that there was going to be a Kinectless Xbox One. I assumed without properly looking at the situation.