I'm not here to say that MS doesn't have people doing bullshit marketing powerplays like the one you described. But in the console market, that's pretty much how the business works.
And in the larger PC market, you've got 3 realistic options and they're all frustrating in one way or another.
The games:
- Fake Fighter 2 Turbo - Project Fake Racing - FakeZilla - Fifa Fakeball 2009 - Tony Hawk's Fake Skater 9
Nonsense, $3000 is peanuts compared to the costs to actually write anything for it. I.e. if you are expecting to be entertained by the device and not augment your creative or professional output by it you are probably not in the core market. I have no idea how it will turn out but it's not a VR helmet as such, it's a wearable HUD with AR capabilities.
To the opposite of Kinect, a LOT of tech journalist and enthusiast tried hololens. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with only issues about the field of view being raised. I personally tried Hololens, I was blown away by the technology. I own an Oculus Rift DK2 and I tried the unreleased consumer version of oculus rift. They are both great technology, and Oculus clearly offer a more immersive gaming experience, but I personally saw more potential with hololens, and generally speaking I thought the technology was cooler. Anyway, if you are genuinely interested, you should definitely try to get at any of the event where they allow people to try it out.
People are singling out Microsoft here, but seemingly forget all of the promises Apple and Google are always making, when Google had to can Glass and Apple can't even get Airdrop to work correctly.
That's why you look at track record to assess behavior. If it happens once, you can forgive it as optimism or somesuch. If it's a pattern, you would then need to assume it's deliberate.
The AR side is equivalent of taking a 6" phablet and holding it at arms length: that dinky rectangle is your augmented viewport.
It doesn't do anywhere near a full AR on everything everywhere you look.
It's also telling, that my previous post in this article was modded down pretty hard. a few of us went to Chicago to demo this, and I was sorely unimpressed. And the AR was only one facet. The bigger problem is their choice of active scanned IR.
They mentioned that their new API will to geocode everything you scan with GPS points, reference points (wifi) and other ways of triangulation. And those points will be linked to Lat/Lon. That sounds exciting and scary both... but with failure to adapt to that huge glowing ball of wideband radiation means the Hololens is a fail outside or near windows.
I guess that leaves the basements to us?
Do they "conveniently" upload all this to "the cloud" too?
My guess is that yes, they would sync to MS local maps of your environments. It would make a great deal of sense, as that's where Google has a huge hole in on their maps service. It would put MS on the "map", literally and figuratively.
Almost all tech journalist that tried it were blown away by the experience. Most of them mentioned the field of view issue, but I haven't read anyone saying that it was such an issue that it made the technology any less impressive.