I'm officially old because I do not find this interesting at all. My son will want it, so we will have it, but as a person who buys a lot of tech, I am not seeing the appeal.
I think it is the all-in-one, do-everything approach it Microsoft is taking with this that disinterests me. Why does every company want to be your everything now a days?
Everything about operating a TV today is pure pain. The centerpiece here is an obtuse, 100-button remote that no one fully knows how to use. You use this remote to get at the "mode switcher", which changes you from TV watching mode, to bluray watching mode, to gaming mode, to whatever else you do with your TV.
It's painful, not to mention a lot of people have receivers to handle the audio portion of this. It's like a really, really bad KVM.
The only way to eliminate that pain was to take over all of the above responsibilities, and MS just did that. With any luck this means you will basically never have to touch your TV's god-awful remote ever again, and the terms "Video 1", "Video 2", and "TV" will cease to have any meaning.
Power on, wait, skip special offers from Microsoft, no I don't want to update the console today, click to make anti-virus warnings go away, okay, now I can pick whether I want to play games or watch TV, TV, live TV or internet, internet, now pick the Netflix channel, and start watching! Hurray!
Yeah, that's so much better than picking "Video 2" and using the Netflix box.
Nor has Microsoft or Sony ever held up anything so you can watch a special offer. This is just FUD.
Go watch the keynote, they cover all of this. They're betting on voice control lowering the "depth" of the UI. Instead of "TV -> live TV -> Sy Fy -> Star Trek" it's just "go watch Star Trek", ditto for on-demand, ditto for sports, ditto for games even. Everything they showed today indicates single-action-to-final-destination.