It's too noisy.  When you turn it on, the hard disk really whines.  It's much louder than my Sky+ box (which, incidentally, has a hard disk 12.5 times the size of the XBox360 one).

That noise is nothing compared to the noise when you put a game or DVD in the drive.  The noise of the DVD drive is much too much for any reasonable living room.  It's not like DVD drives are new technology either - there are plenty of quiet or even slilent DVD players out there.  It just shows that noise wasn't a factor Microsoft cared about when putting the components together.  Maybe they got their custom DVD drive on the cheap, maybe they paid a fortune for them, it still seems shoddy.

The games are OK.  Just OK.  Perfect Dark Zero is an alright shoot-em-up, and I haven't really got into Kameo.  Dead Or Alive 4 is not a bad fighting game, but it should be banished to its own circle of hell for mandating PAL60. I'm not convinced about the possibilities of high-def gaming either.  Games like Perfect Dark Zero aren't exactly photorealistic, so in high-def they'll just be bigger not-photorealistic games.  Until they can do real time photorealism at Standard Definition (which they might not be far away from), High Definition will be nothing to get worked up about.

The best game I've played on the XBox 360 so far is, without a doubt, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.  This is a simple game, in the same vein as Asteroids, but it's fast paced and thoroughly addictive.  It's the only game I've played on the console that has that elusive "Just one more game" feel to it.  It's fast, it's fun, it's cheap, and really it'd probably run on an 8086.  It doesn't need the huge amount of hardware being flung at it.  Other folks seem to like Zuma (another XBox Live Arcade title), but I was disappointed I finished the entire demo the first time I played the game.  (And that was me never having even seen the game before - I just downloaded it, played it, lost one life on the final level, and finished it.)  It doesn't give me hope about the longevity of the whole paid-for game, so I haven't parted with any money for it.  Yet.

The internet connectivity is again just OK.  It's great that it can connect to XBox Live to download things, but it's a terrible, terrible shame that that's all it can do.  XBox Live is your classic 'walled garden' that mobile phone suppliers love so much.  All content has to come via Microsoft, and they'll have to take their cut of any profits.  I don't mind them taking a cut of the profits from people selling things (that's commerce), but this also prevents anyone giving anything away for free.  (Yeah, there ar efree demos for games that are on sale, but they're only put there by companies already paying a Microsoft tax in some way or other).  Why can't I browse web sites on my XBox 360?  Why can't I read RSS?  Why can't I download podcasts in the background and play them at my leisure?

The media features are crippled too.  The visualiser from Llamasoft is funky, but it's hard to get any media on to the box.  I have all my ripped MP3s on a Debian server, but the XBox 360 only wants to know about XP machines.  I know Microsoft have done this to promote XP and make you pay more to them, but it would have been so trivial for them to include code to look for files on a shared drive.  They chose not to do that.  One concession they've made is that it can use uPnP to discover devices with music and photographs - but this doesn't work so well.  For instance, it won't work with uShare (a free uPnP media server) and although it's said to work with TwonkyVision's (paid for) media server I haven't succeeded in getting that to work.  Besides, a recent comparison gave the free XBox Media Center app for the original XBox a much higher score than the media features in the XBox 360.  (Rightly so, too - the XBox 360 won't even stream video from an XP machine, it "requires" an XP Media Center machine.)

The whole code signing nonsense is yet another way of crippling the technology.  All it means is that, if you want to run something on the XBox (whether it be a game or a media program or a podcast client or anything else), you have to pay money to Microsoft to get them to 'sign' the code.  The XBox 360 won't run anything that it unsigned.  I think this is a lost opportunity.  Microsoft have spent the last lot of years trying to convince developers to move to .NET, which is essentially an intermediate language that doesn't care what processor or architecture it's running on.  Why isn't .NET on the XBox360?  Why can't people write their own programs and run them on what MS likes to think of as the digital hub of the living room?  Or if they don't want to go to the hassle of putting .NET on the console, at least grant that opportunity to others, like Mono or even (shudder) Java?  No, they're too busy caring only about the Microsoft tax to want to provide possibilities like that.