I think the argument is very relavent. Yeah, gimmicky games have existed for every system but now everybody wants to design systems around gimmicky ideas. I remeber being totally immersed in many games without the need for fancy peripherals, I didn't need them because the games were fun. I had a Wii for a year before I sold it because the controls became very annoying and most of the games that were released were crap, Even the fun games were hampered by the controls. From what I 've seen of the Natal promos and videos, it just doesn't look very appealing. Yeah, the ideas seem pretty cool but I can see the controls growing old pretty quickly.

Hardware backward compatibility was actually a big selling point for me when the PS3 was first released as I have a huge library of PS2 games and it would allow me to disconnect my PS2 and have one less console to worry about. I held out for a price drop as I could not justify the initial price of the system (and I was enjoying my 360 so much at the time). The initial change was disheartening for me as I don't put a whole lot of faith in software emulation. It may work great for some but if I was going to pay the asking price at the time, I wanted hardware emulation. After the later move to no emulation, I lost almost all interest. I would still like to get a PS3 but the desire now is for less a game console (the exclusive games just aren't there) and for more media streaming and a linux box to play around with (I don't have much interest in Blu-Ray). As good as it may be for those purposes, I cannot justify the current asking price to use it for these purposes.

Thats exactly what I was thinking. I feel burned for the $20 I spent on my legit copy.