Microsoft's Genius

I had seen on here and other sites awhile back a debate on the pricing stuff with all the consoles. Everytime I see something like that, everyone is always hammering Microsoft for their prices. Up until now Sony couldn't or refused to price their hardware in a resonable manner. Nintendo was at a great price point but feature wise they dont have much. I mean without some sort of homebrew the Nintendo Wii cant even play movies. The guys that designed the xbox though are a bunch of geniuses. They built the entire platform off of xbox live and halo. They added Gears to that mix later on and it was a great move for them. Those 3 things together carry so much clout that people are willing to just throw money at the platform. I also see people coming into forums and bragging about the deals they got on certain items. While thats fine and dandy and great if they can get the word out so others can take advantage you still gotta go with the prices you could walk into a store right now and get. Not Ebay, Not craiglist none of that shit. Play n charge kits,wireless adapters, faceplates, hard drives, xbox live subscriptions. Its all designed to keep the core console bringing in profit after you buy it. Now if you get past all of that you could factor in netflix subscriptions and maybe last.fm now. Just those 2 alone with what they kicked around for last fm would cost you about 132 dollars a year just to be able to use the consoles features (last.fm without ad support). To think the new Zune video marketplace is going up soon as well. I dont think diehard xbox fans should just throw down and switch to sony or nintendo. However, I would expect them to stand up and not buy some of this stuff because its highway robbery. They figured out how to take a 200-400 dollar console and within 5 years turn it into one that cost over a thousand.