very well thought out and neat

An informed guess would be that the initial model uses A10-4600M with 3.2GHz CPU at Turbo and 384 GPU shaders at 35W TDP. What we are looking at is a low-mid range laptop hardware packed in a small box.

As the device runs on Linux, initially the best supported games will be the ones using natively ported Source engine. We are probably looking at 720p with medium details in games like Portal 2, higher in older source titles.

It needs to gain a foothold in the market to encourage other publishers to specifically optimize and/or set performance targets for this hardware like they do for consoles (which is a moot point if there is going to be hardware fragmentation for steambox but it is not certain yet).

With that, it all comes down to the price. IMO, if it debuts at 400USD with some bundled steam games it will be moderately successful. 500USD would see limited adoption. Anything more and it flops.

Seeing how Xi3 initially priced the unit at 999USD in their Kickstarter project, I am very skeptical.

I've seen this Xi3 before. It think it's wonderful. And even better when it packs an AMD APU . I think that in the home DIY media centre space, using the mini-itx and nano-itx boards is so old hat now. It's hard to beat the new generation of small form factor PCs for pure density of components and power - thanks to AMD APU graphics you can also do games. It was never possible with VIA, of course.