Pricing and package information for the Xbox 360 has finally been officially released by Microsoft, laying to rest a few areas of next-gen speculation. The bad news? Pretty much everything. The base model will be shipped almost totally barebones, with only a controller and some basic A/V cables. For just $100 more, you can get a whopping 20 Gb hard disk drive, a headset, some great digital cable or something, and a wireless controller. How exciting is that!

I have to be honest – despite my long-harbored loathing for Microsoft’s general practices, I really thought that they were going to do something right here. But they just kept getting it so wrong. They started off really well, what with a strong console design and a new, lower free tier of Xbox Live. But from there, the rumors (I had so hoped that’s what they were) just went south. Limited support for “the best” Xbox games? Late arrival of HD-DVD? True, that latter one proved to be false (they’re just leaving it off period), but the first one is what really burns me. I have held off on getting a plain-jane old Xbox for months on the premise of being able to play those games on the 360. If that’s not a guarantee, then there’s no point in even getting a 360 right now because I could care less about their launch titles.

To quote Daring Fireball:

What possible purpose does it serve to offer a 5 GB model, other than to make it hard to decide which one to buy? It needlessly complicates the product lineup. Remember: every decision you force a customer to make is another chance for them to decide to just walk away.

While the above discusses competitors to the iPod, it functions just as well with regards to the 360. What possible purpose does the Xbox 360 Core whatever serve? If Microsoft is touting the 360’s abilities as a media center (and they will) how is that going to work? What about Xbox Live – doesn’t that make use of the hard drive? And what about games that use the HDD to cache data – is that gone too? Because if you’re taking all those things away, what you have left is a mediocre product for $299.99, and one that’s not even worth buying.

Obviously that should leave all but one choice: the $400 model. But somewhere between $300 and $400 the line gets drawn, to a point where it loses the “I’ll buy it because I can” status. With that in mind, I have a feeling that more than a few spots on the preorder list will be opening up.