I like the term enthusiast better than hardcore so I can agree with this.

So enthusiast gamers, core gamers (average gamer) and casual gamers (the new market). 

 how can it possibly be the price when the core is available for less than the Wii in some places? Second hand (which is how ALOT of casuals get their machines) you can pick up a 360 very cheaply, far cheaper than a Wii. 

The second part of your post is correct (but contradicts your first) in that MS need to introduce more games like banjo, but the problem is the average 360 owner wont buy games like that and therefore oher game studios are reluctant to produce such games for it. They would get far petter sales producing for the Wii or even the PS3 (once sales pick up a little)

Aside from banjo and that Viva Pinata spin off (which will probably suck), theres vertually nothing else due other than big name death/killing games. Anyone without a 360 now, isnt going to buy one to play banjo and then sit twiddling his thumbs untill someone else is daft enough to produce a similar game for the 360. Theyre just going to buy a wii with mario galaxy.

If a casual market was ever goin to happen on the 360, Viva Pinata should have been the start of it, but sadly it recieves nothig but a WTF? from most people.

I have a freind with a 360 and it was embarrassing to try and convince him the game was good, yet, his GF convinced him they needed a wii and now he will happily sit playing bloody cooking mama!! 

Stigmas are hard to remove.

Right now the 360 is trying to ditch the "FPS Console" stigma and the Wii is trying to ditch the "Kiddie Konsole" stigma.

Good luck to them both.

nine - the only issue about the idea of "studios won't make games like Banjo on X360" is partially true.

They won't until sales for the games get better. They get better when MS makes more, which they are.

Heartily disagreed...Nintendo spent a good part of the N64 and GameCube generation trying to ignite "mature" game sales on its systems with little success. Perfect Dark, Conker, Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil 1, 0 and 4, Metroid Prime 1 and 2, MGS: Twin Snakes...you can fill in the gaps until the cows come home, but third parties will keep catering to the most profitable niche.

Attracting mature games by making mature games was (mostly) a waste of time: the fanbase was still more intrested in Mario, and players who didn't like Nintendo weren't going to buy it for a handful of exclusive mature games. I can't speak for everyone, but I feel the same way about 360: Viva Pinata and Blue Dragon look great, but I'm still not interested in the rest of the lineup, so I'll save my $350 for Wii games. Maybe I'm a very small niche in the market, and 360's only problem is the price, but I don't think so. I think the truth is that 360 skews really heavily towards the teen-twenty-something male demographic.

What other games are MS producing for the 360 then? I may be blissfully ignorant but i see hardly anything other than the offerings from rare and their future seems shakey after losing so many of its core staff.

I agree with couchmonkey, certain consoles get branded with certain games and the 360's branding is already far too deep to change (just as the GC's was), their best hope would be to push development of more unusual games to XBLA where they can charge less and allow demos for people unsure about buying them. Even tho this somewhat reduces their target market to the online users, i would imagine it could help curb the current trend of "a 360 for him and a Wii for her" (even tho this seems to soon lead to "another wii remote for him")

I still see the 360 as the most bland console this gen. Catering to all types of gamers should never be an all of the sudden fidgety action; it should be a part of the spinal cord of any console on release.
I'll admit that MS has tried (emphasis on tried) to change their image, but it can't be working very well since most the world have exactly the same perception of it as the original box. And many of these "different" games are... not very good.

Anyway, I'll never buy an X-box for a few reasons:

I don't trust MS products as a whole as far as quality and lifespan are concerned.

The X-box is father to none of the gaming franchises that I've loved or even liked in my many years of gaming.

To conclude:
MS still don't understand the console market as well as they should before attempting to conquer it. Before the release of the original box, MS was sure they'd destroy the PS2 because they had a much bigger and faster processor! All the worlds PC geeks thought the same (which goes to show why they're PC geeks and not console geeks...). And now with the 360, they think they can win by getting their hands on games from the genres that other platforms have already made their own and not neglected for years.
And, no matter how many games they get, or which games they might be; it is still an X-box...