For conquering the living rooms, it's not only the price. It's probably a mix of many factors including:
- number of available games/music/movies/.../content
- easiness of shopping
- design and usability
- cool input devices (kinect-like or other)
- social network connections
- cloud storage backup
- magic capabilities of marketing team.

I guess basing the device on Android is not the worst idea. In any case more competition is good. It would be funny if Google and Amazon would also jump the wagon and announce consoles... (Nexus console and Fire console).

Hey, stealing from the more obscure devices is innovative. :)

By the way, having watched Anandtech's video of using it and reading his comments, I'm more convinced that it's a good product.

Another Android console/media system. Pff. I guess in a year or so there will be as many of these as Android tablets. And then the Chinese will make a cheaper version.

But all the gaming systems will make sure they use proprietary drivers/interfaces/storage media, so that none of them are compatible with one another.

Surely you can stuff in some weird and rare piece of an unwanted hardware there, but I doubt that app/game developers will be interested in a poor audience market. Same goes for interfaces and such. There is just no need for another proprietary-based device.

Since when does "need" have anything to do with it? Does the PS3 "need" to use a non-standard bluetooth stack? Does Apple "need" to use proprietary plugs and cables for all its equipment? Of course not. Using proprietary technologies is never done for the good of the customer, but then neither is anything else, pretty much. It's about money, pure and simple. About cutting off competition, and making sure that if people need anything whatsoever in connection with your system, then they're damn well going to buy it from you, and noone else.

Why not? The more there are, the greater the choice is. As customers we just choose the one we are most comfortable with and make the underlying company super rich. Apple has like a 100 billion $ available and doesn't know what to do with it. All the "conquer the living room" movements now see this shining example and imagine themselves bathing in money in the future. Not all will but some for sure. It's not only about games, it's about social media, movies, music and games.

Yeah, because making just more of those proprietary devices is really what will give their manufacturers real money. Right. In the end, only the big players will remain, whether you want it or not. The lesser will be absorbed or driven out of business. It happened in the computer components, home electronics, network devices markets and so on and so forth.
And the choice? Take for example game market. What developer will want to make a game for a long list of consoles? Well, surely you can make it simple and it will run on any Android or linux contraption. But we have it already on the phones and tablets. So what will be the point in another device? Just another expensive/cheap gadget. Make it for a particular device - you sell less copies of your product.

And since when do you bruteforce the market with your product? You can't push it down everyone's throats.

nVidia is offering a piece of hardware (which gets new revisions quicker than the older ones become widely used), some sw platform (which gets updated so frequently that I stopped to care) and an idea of using a PC as a calculating proxy to play heavier games on this 5 inch (this is rich) handheld. And of course the latter functionality is available only for the select GeForce users. Yep, an awesome device.

All of these Android consoles will be compatible to a large extent. It won't be much different from the PC games ecosystem. Developers will need to address varying underlying hardware, and perhaps support slightly different controls (which is less of an issue on PC), and they'll submit their games to several proprietary stores in addition to Google Play (not that they're not already doing it), integrate different achievement systems, etc.

I'm sure some of these consoles will have exclusives, but I think that their existence in general will spur the development of more console style titles for Android.

I completely agree. Some will not "get" it, and like many self absorbed tech commentators will think this means it won't succeed, and if it does they will continually be baffled by it and call its user by various unflattering names.

I guess the whole purpose it not a revolution but evolution. Basically a smaller, silent PC with gaming and network capabilities. Nothing that wouldn't have been possible already ten years ago. However I guess that companies now feel that the time is right for downsized PC technology to be widely used in living rooms.

That seems like a silly question. Since always? It seems to work for Sony, Apple, Nintendo, Microsoft, etc.

I'm not gonna be one of those who calls people names. I'll just face the fact and move on. But it'd take more for it to really succeed, than just fancy marketing on nVidia's side. Because that's what it is right now.