Some proof that a HDD should be required

I've been listening to the 1up podcast and they've shown just how disruptive the lack of a HDD can be in the console space. At some sort of a conference there were some announcements made regarding MMOs on the 360. Apparently, there's been the decision that an MMO title should reserve 4gb of disk space on a hard drive for patches, extra content, etc. Sounds cool, right? Well, MS is really shooting themselves in the foot on this one. 4gb is not only what a game should reserve, it's *all* a game can use. If a developer creates content that pushes the space necessary to 6gb, guess what? They're going to have to cut down on what's in there to fit within 4gb. Developers were told they need to plan to have a scaler in their games so that when the 4gb cap is exceeded, content of some sort starts getting cut out, whether that be texture quality downscaling, areas becoming unaccessible, character models losing polys, etc. They attribute this cluster to the fact that there are x amount of systems out there without a hard drive and how MS gauges a person with their absolutely ludicrous hard drive prices. The Core system is a device for MS to hit the $149 price point as soon as possible. And not only is it most likely to hit the low $$$ amount quick, it's most likely to take the gamer's experience down to all-time lows quickly as well. Good job, MS.