Since its got the hardware inside there's always the possibility that this functionality magically appears in iOS 4.3 or similar.
It happened with apps and the original iPhone, I think Apple would be happy to wait until they have a polished product for launch and then announce rather than pre-announce before it's ready.
This could also be Apple's trojan horse into the console market. There are already thousands of games available on the iPhone and iPad. It wouldn't be too hard to port many of them over to this platform since they're all running iOS. Perhaps you can use your existing iPod touches/iPhones as input devices. There's so much potential without even looking at the TV-content side of the business.