According to The New Yorker the reason the Playstation 4 is getting so much better press than the XBOX One is because whiny kids who play video games just don't understand that their whole world is about to be rocked by new way to watch TV. You can Skype while watching TV or playing a game! It's a whole new interface! You can turn it on by talking to it! It's going to be awesome in four years!
Even if this is true and even if one concedes that the future of game consoles isn't just gaming (which seems to me to be a trope that we've heard for a long, long time now), I contend that the future of gaming consoles at least has to START with video games and video gamers. And at $500 there is no way it will.
We've always been told that the way Microsoft was going to revolutionize the living room with the XBOX was to get it in living rooms as a video game system first, and THEN take over the TV. But instead they added all the new TV functionality and increased the price by $100. Getting a video gamer to spend $500 on a console is not impossible. But getting them to spend $500 when a more video game-centric console exists for $100 less might be the end of the XBOX.
All of the non-gaming stuff the XBOX One has been showing off is something I'd love to have in my Apple TV (except maybe the "always on" camera which I still think is just creepy). But the Apple TV is just $99. No one is going to spend $500 for a jacked-up Apple TV. And most gamers aren't going to spend an extra $100 to have a harder time playing video games.
The XBOX One won't "be the box you’ll want connected to your TV four years from now" if they don't sell enough of them this year.
(I'd also like to add that author Matt Buchanan calling the DRM scheme of XBOX One "groundbreaking" is just silly. Doesn't anyone remember DIVX?)
The Future of Game Consoles Isn't Just About Games [The New Yorker, posted by Matt Buchanan]