I think we've moved beyond the hardcore stage of the console lifecycle and the appeal is broadening to include less die hard gamers and those with differing tastes from this year onwards.
The games that will really move hardware for the 360 now, are the "Come and play with me" type games that are easy to get into and have a wide appeal. Games like Fable 2, Sacred 2, Halo Wars, Too Human, and the old Halo 3 are the keys to accelerating sales for the Xbox360 this year IMO. Price cuts would only assist this process further. My reasoning is this, an Xbox360 owner buys a game. He wants to play Coop or Multiplayer with a friend without a console so he says "Hey I think you should buy an Xbox360 so we can Coop on X and Y game and I think you'll enjoy it, its only $299 now". I don't think its a coincidence that the Xbox360 upcoming games lineup is stacked with quite a few of these types of games.
This is the key for the Xbox360 to broaden its sales base in the states and for Microsoft to sell more of its extremely profitable Live Gold subscriptions. This is targeting the gap between the Wii and the HD consoles at present to try and draw in as many people as they can. Consoles with easy multiplayer are perfect examples of this. The Wii by design is a "Come and play with me" console, and IMO this explains a lot of their success. Their own userbase is their best marketing weapon.
They can afford Price cuts strictly because they expect X numbers of Gold subscriptions to be sold per console and they benifit from current ones as well, they can finally make the console fully reliable and divert a lot of the money used to pay for repairs into profits/price cuts, and the total cost to make the machine will drop with this refresh even more so than the Falcon, because the GPU and heatsink are both big and expensive and the fact that they are shrinking every other chip on the motherboard.
Lastly I think the Jasper refresh is time for Microsoft to make some changes to the console specs.
1. The small HDD and lack of wireless is hindering their Live/Online media delivery strategy so it makes perfect sense to at least implement wireless if not bump the HDD space up a little to 40-60gb on the Pro model. They lose money when people can't connect to live gold or when they buy the competitions console because the Xbox doesn't have wireless. They lose further when they miss out on potential media/arcade sales due to a lack of space. Wireless and some extra HDD space is cheap and they'd likely make the money back easy with extra gold subscribers and extra sales. The chips and the changes required to do both would cost less than $5 to implement most likely.
2. Optional Blu ray in the Elite SKU. They have a close relationship with ATI so implementing a media decoding chip will be a cinch, especially as they're shrinking all the chips and releasing a new motherboard design.
Tease.
