I agree with you about carrying around discs being easy. I am based in New Zealand, and carrying around a disc is alot easier and cheaper than always downloading the game. I think downloading games is an incidental feature when the game licencing is centrally controlled with cloud-based distribution.

I think Microsoft's biggest failure is the marketing around the Xbox One and their failure to explain how the game sharing works. Just from my personal understanding of the link I posted, it seems to me that you can let up to ten people play any game that is owned by your account. So, once you buy a game, any of those ten people can play it without purchasing it themselves.