While I do agree that the lack of a dedicated server feature is somewhat annoying, having the game manufacturer responsible for maintaining the online portion of the game I believe is a bad idea.
It might be the way it's done on PCs where there is no possible central authority, but on consoles there really should be some kind of coordination.
Take EA as the big example of developer run servers. A lot of their "old" online games no longer work online even on the xbox because they demanded to run their own servers. Other games, such as those on the original xbox not by them, still work.

You don't need the hardware virtualization to run VMware at all. It just improves the experience if you have it.

You do need hardware virtualization for the XP mode Microsoft is including.

VMware runs just fine on machines without hardware virtualization (such as an Athlon 64 3400+, which doesn't even have the capability to run 64-bit guests). I doubt that Microsoft would have put pressure on them at all as it would do nothing to actually limit their competition (virtualbox also runs fine on my netbook) and it obviously hurts their problem of trying to support old software.

Spoofing the user agent isn't exactly the desired method as the user agent is important for statistics and other things. I don't think it should ever be necessary to spoof it if everyone is acting nicely (server and client).

It already had ads in the streamed videos, which Boxee did display.

I've never heard of a Google IMAP client but you can deselect folders in your email client (I use Opera and do have the All Mail group disabled). And they also have added IMAP controls: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-advanced-imap-controls.html "You can choose which labels to sync in IMAP -- useful if you find your mail client choking on a big [Gmail]/All Mail folder."