Thanks for the heads up. I'd been really tempted by the Arcade due to the price tag, but DLC and XBLA are pretty much essential to keeping breadth of potential gaming experience as wide as possible.

That said, I'm leaning away from the Elite. I doubt that the extra HD space makes that much of a difference if I'm willing to ruthlessly delete stuff that I'm not using. Unless a console uses space very differently from a computer.

I prefer a console that has games and a stable company behind it. :-p

If I was getting a console for the pure fun factor, I'd actually get a Wii. But I'm getting a console so that I can critically analyze cutting edge games, particularly graphics intensive single player games that my computer won't run (like Fallout 3), and the Wii is a graphically non-intensive machine that's at its best in a party setting.