Not always having the HDD is a big misstake on Microsofts part. Games such as Morrowind, Chronicles of Riddick, Ninja Gaiden and a bunch of others would never have been possible without the harddrive. I doubt that the Xbox would have had the actually really graphically impressive games that it has without it. Besides, the only thing MS gains from this is being able to say that the Xbox 360 costs less than the PS3. Problem is just that everyone knows thats just a sales pitch.

Yeah this will have the extremely annoying and often load times consistant with consoles... Hard drive is so much better, even if its only 1 or 2 gigs being used as a swap... I guess its all about cutting costs, and the size of the console. Also with the xbox not moving to HD-DVD (AFAIK) theres eventually going to be a lot of compressed data, because games are already filling up dual layer disks..

You cannot judge the consoles as to how well they sold but how good the hardware was. The HDD on the Xbox allowed for games to run that never would have worked on the minimal 64mb of RAM that is has. The same situation will probably arise down the line with the Xbox360. Right now, at release... this thing already hurts the machine as it's harder for developers to do what they need to. Yes, it's not impossible of course... but it would be a selling point for developers to have it available.