To HDD or not to HDD... (Part 3; Conclusion)

yeah, what TANK says - There is no way I could say it any better.

I'd read that to be "we're notified that icons will probably be needed in the future and we want to make sure it works out for us"

I believe there's only two games out there that require the HDD to play, Phantasy Star and some football manager game. But they need to get special clearance from Microsoft before they got to pass certification with such a requirement. If you have an HDD, games should be designed to take advantage of it by at least using it as a stream cache for loading. But unfortunately most games take very little advantage if the HDD is there so your experience is largely the same between the core and the premium 360's. My personal opinion is that every xbox should have come with an HDD and developers should figure out how to use it properly to improve loading times in the game. I hate when i have to re-do a mission and i have to wait for it to load again. Why isn't that stuff on the hard drive ready to go? Burnout Revenge drove me nuts with that. Microsoft made a number of design mistakes iwth the 360, the optional HDD is definitely one of them in my opinion.