It needs to be said that the XBOX ONE still requires you to have an internet connection during the initial setup process. So those people who live in areas with no internet connections, and our soldiers, will not be able to play games on the XBOX ONE still.
This will only affect the initial batch of machines until they change the firmware installed at the factory. After the first few months the change should be in all shipping units.
It's pretty much the same situation as the Wii U launch. Nintendo had severely broken firmware they didn't want consumers to deal with and deicided it was better to have that huge download. If my nephew in Afghanistan really wanted a Wii U for use there, he'd have me make the buy and get it updated before shipping it to him. No big deal. He'd do the same thing with a PS3 or Xbox 360 as a precaution just because there are updates frequently enough to expect a newly purchased machine to need some. The same goes for a new computer or a wide variety of other consumer electronic devices that are heavily firmware driven.
Since my nephew is in the Marine Corps version Geek Squad, he actually has fairly good internet access for where he is. A lot of guys who out in forward bases would bring their gear to him to get it updated, with the understanding it will be pretty slow due to low bandwidth and usage restrictions.
^ I don't know what any of that means.
Does anyone actually think MS will remove this permanently? From they way they've been talking post interview it seems like it will eventually be brought back.
Most likely it will be offered as an opt-in for those who wanted the new features.
I had no problem with the original design. My internet has been pretty solid for the last fifteen years, going back to when I was the only DSL user in my entire neighborhood because nobody else had asked for it and they weren't ready to start promoting it. I really liked the features they were describing and the connectivity requirement doesn't bother me at all, just as it doesn't for my phone or tablets. I have plenty of Android games that run a license check every single time I run them. It adds a couple seconds to getting into the game, so a single daily check-in that covered every bit of software on the device would be a bit more convenient.
They would have to make Kinect not mandatory.
That would help with the price but the Xbox One still has slower memory than the PS4 and if the rumors about yield issues are true then the Xbox One could be significantly less powerful than the PS4. (my understanding is that the eSRAM yield issues result in clockspeeds being lowered all-around thus making the entire system less powerful)
Your source for this? Yields on the ESRAM should not be a problem unless it is a really, really large volume that would make no sense in this application, as it would get into dimishing returns in aiding performance. Meanwhile, the greater number of GPU cores in the PS4 APU incurs yield penaties of its own.
If you look at the product line from Nvidia and AMD/ATI at any given moment, you'll find the mid-range GPUs will have a certain number of elements for a certain price per core. The high end cards will have a greater number of cores at a notably higher price per core. This is almost entirely due to yields. Those chips which are intended to have, say, 100 cores but only 80 of them pass testing, can still be sold as a lesser product. This applies mainly to the cutting edge chips where you try to make the highest model each time and get you lower models from the ones that don't cut it but are salvageable.
This is how the 486SX came into existence way back when. The 486 was Intel's first CPU with a dedicated FPU built-in and a good protion of the production was coming up with bad FPUs. So they sold them as a model without an FPU, which was still acceptable back then. The reduced price made it so popular that Intel eventual had to start making them on purpose. There weren't enough 486 chips with bad FPUs to meet demand.
Anyway, yields is one of the reasons Microsoft chose a large on-die buffer in place of more GPU cores. It mitigated the difference in memory type used and the overall package was less likely to have production problem at the initial process node. Unless AMD is going to be selling a cut-down APU product that is identical to the PS4 APU with less cores, it means that any chip that comes up fewer than the minimum specced after testing is going to be a complete loss. (The design likely includes at least two spares to allow for some failure margin.)
...no perceived qualifier there 
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