: 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

It goes deeper than that. The Kinect has facial recognition and can read expressions.
This creates the potential for it to analyse a users reactions and interests in adverts and such. That kind of data could essentially be put into a spreadsheet format.

: 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.

Hardly that comparable.

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.

An awful lot of assumptions there based on very little.
This things don't just happen in exactly the same way that games don't just happen.
Budgets are what they are. There is only so much money and it is divided up accordingly.
Significant money going into entertainment services is money not going towards gaming aspects.
Time will tell how it pans out, but I certainly wouldn't claim that any of these features will be trivial to add or maintain.