that's a fairly valid concern

: Some are a bit perturbed at the idea of a camera/microphone in their home
: that is always on.

I doubt it'll draw that much power... it's probably not about that though... unless this sells abysmally and they hardly get anyone using XBL and possibly some other on-line frameworks, even if the Kinect and the Xbone send your speech and ambient noise to Microsoft, there will be way too much data for them to make heads or tails of it any time this century

: Personally, I'd have certain concerns about it's size and where to put the
: damn thing.
: Other than it's lack of practical functionality in a room my size, one of the
: reasons I packed Kinect away was because of it's size and lack of secure
: place to keep it.
: Made all the more difficult with how thin modern TV's are, so you can't just
: stick it on top easily.

one of the things I read mentioned putting under the TV; maybe that'll help?

: This forms the basis of saying they are sacrificing game support.
: All the time, effort and resources they have poured into these aspects is
: time and money that has not been put into the gaming aspects of the
: machine.

This is flawed in the same way as people complaining a developer put too much into this or that mode they don't play or weapons they don't like, there are different systems and different people that go into them. Also the (multi-) media functions are subsidiary or subordinate to the gaming functions-- just by being a modern gaming machine with all that entails, it's capable of doing all this other stuff, it's just a matter of having people write the software and probably securing some contracts with content providers. Well, that makes it able to almost all of this, the feed in (HDMI in) and the system(s) that work(s) with it are something else, but it's known, proven technology that should be almost trivial to add, especially given the architecture. It does remain to be seen if those systems and that circuitry and programming have an effect on other uses, though, and it's possible they do.