I fell asleep in the middle of my rapid fire retort posts to Cuecil... Man, so many pages have gone by since then!
The idea that MS will be aggressive with their pricing to try and undercut Sony shows a total lack of understanding of their situation. MS does not want to be losing money on their systems, that's why they were priced the way they were, to make profit on the hardware alone, and not need to offset with games/XBL. But that's not working out for them. They've done an indirect price cut through retailers, that helped move some units, but it's still fighting an uphill battle, even at that price point, and only in 2 territories. And even in the UK, the price cuts are even bigger, because they are making price cuts on a much higher exchange rate and that translates to much lower margins.
Parity in sales is not competition. That's crony capitalism, when you prop up a losing company just to keep it around. Competition means a side outperforms another because it presents itself as the better option, for the cost/performance, etc. The PS2 managed this, and the layout of this generation seems to be heading in that way again, though exactly how high the numbers will be may be extremely variable, because of the change in the landscape (Japan decreasing, new markets opening sooner)
