FYI the aforementioned Boxee hack for AppleTV is actually an XBMC fork.

any different from what Gametap has been doing for quite some time now. In fact I had to go fiddling around in the settings to turn it off to make sure when I've 'downloaded' a game it's really fully downloaded so I wont get hit with some very annoying lag in certain cut-scenes as they'd be 'dynamically loading' from the servers just as they were supposed to be playing. I'm more than happy to just wait an extra few minutes to get everything local rather than bother with this type of thing.

Even if the design was patentable, said patent would have expired decades ago by now anyway.

Because they've already had to extend the testing deadline twice for lack of enough submissions and someone's got around to submitting it to a few sites like /. in hopes of getting more people involved, that's why.