i think it's kind of adorable than anyone even thought for a second microsoft was just going to allow people to throw apps up on a store for the xbox without any approval or curation
you guys are never going to have emulators or plex or anything like that on your xbox. come on, now
I don't think anyone ever thought there'd be
no curation. The Windows App Store is curated, after all (just fairly loosely).
The question mark was how curated it was going to be. Given that it's a console rather than some generic set-top box, it being fairly tightly curated is no real surprise.
Still a huge step up from the way it worked on 360, though (and the barriers to entry are far, far lower).
The rules for game devs and app devs could very likely be different.
Well, the way it works right now is quite simple, really - you can't deploy to xbox without having a devkit. You can't get a devkit without being approved for ID@Xbox (or being a traditional game developer with a publisher with an approved project).
We'll see how that changes when they roll out the your-retail-xbox-is-a-devkit feature. Given that they gave all the attendees a retail xbox (and dev event give-aways like that are always for the primary purpose of spurring adoption of the platform), I suspect it'll be fairly easy to get entry to whatever dev program they launch (probably something similar to the iOS dev program, or the old XNA model, with a $99/year sub; albeit with much steeper requirements for final store approval than either of those).