Do you buy a Media Centre PC, or an Xbox 360?

Because the Xbox 360 is so highly specced, and so cheap and cheerful compared to Microsoft Media Centre PCs, many households contemplating buying a PC could switch to the console instead.

Those households are, in the words of CPU manufacturers, "CPU agnostic". They don't care if it's an AMD CPU nor do they care if it's Intel Inside. The question they will ask is, is it cheap? Can I run my videos on it? Will it be noisy? Will it be, er, cheap?

Unlike a Media Centre PC, an Xbox 360 won't set your household back an absolute fortune and if the machine performs according to the specifications Microsoft heralded yesterday, what need for a full blown Media Centre PC anyway?

The dilemma facing PC OEMs, dealers and distributors is that given the way interest rates are going, and the price of oil and the like, it could make perfect sense for homes to go Xbox 360, because it will satisfy many many demands.

Microsoft and Intel partners won't be very happy about it. But who cares about them? Certainly not Microsoft and Intel. Much, anyway. µ