I would never change my ways. It would be just a ripe off of the Wii. I will not support a company that rips off of other companies to make money

So if all Microsoft does is copy could you tell me which console maker they copied Xbox Live from?  Also how many other consoles offered multiple SKUs in the way that Microsoft did when the 360 first came out?  It's laughable to assume that Nintendo is the only company that can innovate.  For all we know the Newton could be used in games on the 360 in ways that have never been realized before.  Imagine Tiger Woods PGA Golf over Xbox Live in which friends could easily play in virtual clubs and tournament at a level never before seen in the series.

You keep speaking about the Nintendo's GameCube core titles as though they were underpinned by the same philosophy of Nintendo's current gen casual games, with the implication that the key difference is motion controls.

IMO, the philosophy that underpins games like Wii Sports begun with the DS. Nintendo's 'core' titles are less casual, and as we have seen with the likes of SMG, Metroid Prime Corruption, less commercially successful.

So as Killergran suggested it is the new philosophy that accounts for much of its current success. Motion controls are only part of the equation. This is what seperates the current generation from the last one in Nintendo's case.

Secondly, the Newton will be hampered by the fact that many if not most Xbox gamers wont have it. This is unlike the Wii remote which is included with every console. Take the balance board for example. Very few games at this stage utilise it, despite its userbase of 10 million. Why go for 10 million when you can make a game for 39 million?

True, Wii Sports did it alone. But you forget that Wii Sports is what created the Wii image as 'fun'. It had a clean slate to start with. There was no other image attatched to the Wii before the 'fun' image. It was also a launch game, and noone expects there to be 200 awesome games at launch. Launch games are expected to define the image of the console for the ones that come after.

The Xbox is currently deeply associated with... I don't have the right word, but the word that comes closest to it I would say is 'serious'. Halo, JRPG's, FPS's. These are all serious games. To wash away this image, you cannot simply make do with one single game. Look at Little Big Planet. As awesome as that game is, it really hasn't budged the image of the console.

And the changes in image you are mentioning are not fundamental. They're strenghtening it, and polishing it. In Japan, it's still a 'serious' machine. It's not 'fun'. Imagine Ferrari (or whoever owns them) suddenly realizing that Honda make more money than they do. How would they go about to change the 'sporty and rich' image to a 'affordable, effecient and reliable' image?

(The answer is they would introduce a new brand, of course. It's all too difficult to change the image of an existing brand.)

Some part of me is curious: the new Nintendo philosophy applied to one of the "core" franchises like Mario or Zelda has the potential for much higher sales... and a completely different kind of quality.

It's kind of exciting.

Please. Is that all you can come up with? Online gaming has existed in a big way for decades. I'll give you the multiple sku's, but I think Apple did that before MS.

But what sorts of innovations have MS produced in terms of GAMES? All I see is a copycat mentality, illustrated by titles like Lips, Scene it and the new Avatars.

We've already gotten a glimpse of it on the DS. New Super Mario Bros. and Phantom Hourglass definitely had a different approach than their immediate predecessors; at least in my opinon, they "felt" radically different. Granted, it wasn't as dramatic a leap as going from Mario/Zelda/Metroid to Wii Sports/Fit/Music, but it does show they're thinking along those lines.

The change to the console's image in Japan is fundamental.  It was seen before as simply an outside console for a niche audience that enjoys games made by Western studios.  It's now seen as a system that is accumulating an impressive library of Japanese made games and especially in genres it was never even mentioned in before.

Indeed! Phantom Hourglass beating out all previous handheld Zeldas (unless you combine the two versions of Link's Awakening) seems to indicate that this is a good thing, and New Super Mario Bros. being more or less completely evergreen seems to nod in the same direction.

The idea of the Wii versions of these titles being taken in new directions, though, is even more exciting, because the Wii opens up possibilities that the DS doesn't.

I'm not quite sure what they are (in terms of specifics; I think we can all recognize the potential), but that's kind of the point.

In fairness, there's little Nintendo's done that's completely innovative by itself either: the innovative part comes in how they applied, say, touch screens or gyrometers to gaming, or how they tried to make things like a .3 megapixel camera fun. Arguably, then, you have to give Microsoft credit for the multiple SKUs (although personally I see that as a step downwards, but that's tangential). And they applied the PC online model to consoles, which was a first.

Credit where credit's due, and all that. Although I agree that their games, themselves, tend to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. Still, that demonstrably appeals to many people, so more power to them, I guess.