Pretty this won't be. In an interview with Gamasutra, Microsoft big cheese Aaron Greenberg ended up discussing the rivalry between the Xbox 360 and Wii, and in the process loftily dismissed Nintendo's console as a "novelty."

Greenberg compared Wii buyers to "the same people that buy a karaoke machine," and suggested that the console was simply "something [to] break out when people come over, and it's maybe a fun thing [...] They're not really buying it for games, they're just buying it as a novelty." From there, he adopts a more conciliatory tone, stating that Microsoft "[doesn't] really see the Wii as a direct competitor, we actually very much complement the Wii experience." Greenberg believes that Wii owners will eventually "graduate" to the Xbox 360.

While we can't ignore the 360's higher software tie-in ratio, Greenberg and his fellow naysayers seem to forget that the Wii hardware alone turns a profit for Nintendo, that it continues to thrash the pants off everything else out there, and that demand still outstrips supply in some parts of the world, despite the thing launching more than 18 months ago. The tiresome excuse of Wii being a "novelty" is beginning to wear horribly thin.