We still believe in Kinect. We arent interested in splitting the development base. The more demos Ive seen, the more Ive used it the more impressed I am. The team feels strongly about Kinect, and I hope were able to prove that when you use it.
We also have a ton of privacy settings to allow people to turn off the camera, or microphones, or put it in a state just for Xbox On and IR blasting there will be a lot of user control for that.
The thing we all understood, and hence this change, is that there are some scenarios where people just may not be comfortable. We wanted people to be 100% comfortable, so we allow the sensor to be unplugged. And clearly the it dropped scenario is possible.
The most obvious thing is watching a DVD/BD, or streaming a movie, or HDMI pass-through, your experience isnt impacted (except you miss voice and IR blasting)
There is no gotcha, but obviously, if there is a game that REQUIRES Kinect (like Rivals), or something where Kinect IS the experience (like Skype), those wont work.
That said, for people who have privacy concerns there are user control settings, which we believe are great.