Ok: I think one easily gets the other impression from your want/need distinction. Regardless: the first two paragraphs do not even touch on that: that person might 'need' an Xbox, but not one that has a working blue video composite. The point is that there is an elasticity to the demand curve for everything that the person might 'want', but there is no obvious breaking point where you suddenly end up with a 'need': and a great example is that you do not really 'need' food, you just want it very very badly.

That's fair enough. I think this explains the reactions of others in this thread. The distinction between want and need isn't important to my original point, and I certainly wasn't intending to claim them as objective. It was a careless choice of words.