[citation][nom]gogogadgetliver[/nom]F-14:A 12 year old understands that other people have valid opinions.Why an X-box?It costs 1/2 of the graphics card I just purchased and I've gone through many such upgrades during the life of the 360.You can sit down in a more social setting with others in the living room.It accomplishes what you can do on a PC (say watch Huluplus, Skype, Play music) without the technical hassle of hooking a PC up to an entertainment system. It also boots and gets on task in a fraction of the time.It has a Kinect sensor so you can say "xbox, pause" when you need to get more popcorn.Don't be an elitist PC gamer. I game more on PC but it's not that hard to see why I also have an Xbox.[/citation]I am not a PC gaming elitist or anything, and generally don't get involved it this sort of poo-slinging, but what the hell...
Put simply, my PC shits on games consoles. Yes, Hulu/Skype/Etc is a hassle to televise, but neither does it cost me a subscription to Xbox Live Gold, without which my Xbox 360 becomes retarded and is magically unable to do most of the features quoted in the interface. Unless M$ are piping these services through their own hardware I fail to see why Gold tax is justified.
Yes, the Xbox is cheap - it's also shitty, and multiple generations behind the latest hardware. Before someone argues that it still "runs the latest games", recall that it runs them at a fraction of the FPS of your typical modern PC. Also, bear in mind that the reason it still runs them is because most games have to be written for them to make money. Ever wondered why so many modern games look and run exactly the same? Even years apart? Consoles are quite literally holding back technical advancement in modern video games.
Yes, the Xbox boots reasonably quickly - a boot time easily bested by my computers. They will also roundly thrash the Xbox at load times for games.
Kinect is an intruiging idea for human interface with menus and commands... and other machine vision applications... but for gaming, I hate Kinect with the force of a thousand suns. Unresponsive. Buggy. Unintuitive. It's atrocious. Simply atrocious. If you think otherwise, you are the reason the gaming industry is buying into this shit and I hate you as much as I hate the Kinect itself.
But yeah, totally not a PC gaming elitist or anything. I just feel the consoles have their place, and comparing them to PCs does both platforms a disservice.