Apparently it uses a
proprietary data port for the headset, meaning none of your existing headsets will work, and all future ones must be properly "licensed and authenticated" by Microsoft. Sounds like what Apple did with the Lightning connector in an attempt to foil third-party cable manufacturers by putting a custom chip into the connector.
Oh, and those fancy TV functions that are so integral to the system? It requires
extra hardware that they didn't tell you about at the conference. That hardware includes a simple
IR blaster that connects to the rear of the unit and is used to control your other devices to do things like change the channel. It does integrate anything.. it's a glorified, voice-activated, $400 remote control.
Solo4114 is definitely right about where MS's priorities are. The problem is that those aren't the priorities of their audience. People already have hardware that can do all of this stuff. Xbox is a game system. It plays games. It can do other stuff, too, but it's primary purpose is a game system. If they wanted to launch it as something else, they shouldn't have called it Xbox. You don't take the system's primary function and push it into a ten-minute demo at the end of the conference. It should have been the exact opposite.. games should have dominated the conference, and then they could have finished up with "Hey, check out all this OTHER stuff it can do!" and people would have been a hell of a lot more impressed.
Microsoft's biggest problem (in multiple products, including Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox) is that they actually believe their own marketing department's hype machine. They believe that, because they say it's the best, that it IS the best, and that everyone will want it. And then they're quite literally baffled by the negative reaction. I've heard their reaction yesterday was "shock" at the negative press and the fact that everyone wasn't tripping over their own tongues in an effort to extol the virtues of this amazing new piece of tech.
Speaking of tech... same amount of memory, but noticeably slower DDR3 memory. But, possibly offset by a on-die cache that could alleviate the issue and bring overall memory performance more or less in line with PS4. However, the PS4's graphics processor is 50% more powerful. They're going to have a hell of a time trying to get like-for-like performance, and early reports from developers seem to confirm this.. the difference in performance is much more noticeable this time than it was last time. With PS3/X360, most of the power difference was academic because of the wildly different architectures, and actual live performance was more or less on par. Not so this time.. they have almost the exact same hardware architecture as each other (which means porting between them will be a breeze compared to previous generations), but the PS4 has a lot more muscle.
For a "home entertainment center", that doesn't mean much. For a gaming machine, that's a big problem.
