You know, I use my Xbox every day, but usually not for games. I canceled cable, and now download all of the shows I like via Bittorrent (through RSS, so they come in automatically) and stream them. I use PCs in my other rooms (especially the exercise room) so all of my content is accessible anywhere. I'll also use the Xbox to spin tunes when we have people over or I'm cleaning or whatnot. So yeah, I love the media streaming features.

I also occasionally watch the MSNBC in the Media Center part, but man is that an awful experience. It's really buggy at times, and I have an insanely fast internet connection. I can't imagine what it's like for the average user.

That's a really neat feature of the 360. I think it's an excellent media center.

At the same time, I agree with the ancestral poster: I wish that Microsoft and Sony held more reverence for gaming. I say this as somebody who wants to be a game developer: right now, gaming is easily the most disregarded artistic medium. Most games are sequels or spin-offs or rip-offs, have been for two generations. There are some games that rise to the top - the Katamari series and Shadow of the Colossus both showed, on a mediocre system, just how hilarious/moving a good game can be - but even most of the top-name games are awful. The writing and character graphics of Fallout 3 made me cringe on quick glance.

Part of it is that games have become a generic commodity. You have the shooter genre, the RPG genre, the sports genre, the racing genre, and games compete to be the best of each every generation, and it's always the same groups competing. You don't have this treatment of a game as an art form.

Unlike movies where you start off in theaters, unlike TV shows which start off as incremental releases, with games the release is the release and that's the only release. Games lose their mysticism an hour after they've launched. It's terribly demeaning of the entire medium, the way things stand right now. And it hurts both the developers and the consumers to have games treated so matter-of-fact. It kills something that ought to be magical.

My wife and I are just about to cancel our cable in favor of Netflix (both DVD and streaming) + the odd Bittorrent to fill in the gaps while TV gets its act together. Saving $50 a month pays back an XBox 360 pretty quick (plus I asked for cash this Christmas to defray this expense).

I've been gunning to cancel cable for about two years now, without blowing a wad to do it (ideally I want to come out ahead within a year); early adopters who don't want to spend a ton should start looking at what they actually use the TV for, consider what they watch and where they can find it, and start running the math. Now if I could just get some sort of decent fiber-based internet...

You won't miss cable unless you're a sports fan. The Stanley Cup finals are pretty much the only time I'll find myself looking for somewhere to watch live TV.

I don't even bother with Netflix. You can download any new releases, often before you can find the DVDs (especially during Oscar season, when all of those screeners end up leaked) and full seasons of any TV shows. You do usually miss out on the commentary though if you're into that.

At the risk of sounding like a quaint, out-of-touch old man, I would actually prefer that it be at least mostly fully legal. If everybody freeloads, nobody makes Futurama or Pixar movies. As much as I believe in, love, and participate in open source software, I believe the forces that enable open source software scale poorly to other fields.