With everybody talking about the DRM (justifiably so, as it is pants-on-head retarded), I'm surprised that nobody (that I've seen in a quick skim) has talked about the ugly design. Seriously, it's like the ancient IBM ThinkPads my Journalism teacher is so fond of. A big ugly block of black plastic. And it's designed to lie flat instead of standing up, just so that it takes up as much space as possible.
I barely touched on it @ page 3, with "the specs in the PS4 and X1 are basically a mid-range gaming PC crammed into a HTPC case."
Sure, it's visually plain. So is the case my PC lives in... but when I'm using it,
I'm not looking at the case.
The custom melted-plastic look that MS used for the 360 is unnecessary design energy spent, and makes air cooling throughput more difficult. In hindsight, I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason for the RROD debacle on the 360 was a cooling failure of a critical part.
On top of that, I'm guessing that MS is trying to not alienate people who don't identify as Gun-Bro sh00t3r d00dz. The title Gamer still carries a stigma with it, and something as visually obvious as a 360 Makes-You-A-Gamer in a lot of people's eyes. Even if you're not actively contributing to the CoD-BLOPS-a-lypse or the LoL-ocaust.
MS wants to win the war for the living room. If they succeed, it will be on the merits of what the software does for people, not how overwrought the case is made to look.