More thoughts:

>> Sony hasn't really said where the "March 2006" intro date applies, either at E3 or subsequent PS3 related events. Don't be surprised if the March date is for Japan, followed by North America a few months afterward and then Europe and ROW even later into the year. Regardless, they seem committed to BRD for a variety of obvious reasons.

>> Microsoft, on the other hand, has been more than cagey about many of the details surrounding Xbox 360. Since we didn't get to see the rear panel of the unit at E3 no one has said for certain if they will continue the notion of using a variety of different dongles to determine the output connectivity or go as Sony will by including "hard" connection jacks for HDMI and digital audio. Current guessing is that they WON'T have hard HDMI jacks, and it's unlikely, theoretically possible, that they would be able to do a "dongle to HDMI" cable.

>> Some of the details still uncertain are if the optical drive in the 360 will be user upgradeable, which would give them the ability to start with a standard red laser drive and offer a migration path later, presuming that the internal HW can deal with the selected high def DVD format. We're all still guessing about this one. MS and Toshiba have ties on the computer side of things for HD-DVD, but that may or may not influence the world of Xbox. You're quite correct that they're in a time crunch as it is, and that there WILL be loads of "HD" on the initial 360 platform, but it's likely to be output only from red-laser based games and through conventional Y/Pr/Pb component outputs.

Yikes, it's a mess! With all of this, the Outlaws' decision to keep it all simple and go with DVI for now in parallel with tried and true analog component seems to be a wise choice.