Did I mention that I got my hands on a 360?  I lucked out and got one at a very decent price from eBay.  Due the the last big shipment, eBay was/is pretty saturated and the prices have gone way down.  Anyway, I've had the 360 for almost a week, which I think is enough time to give it a thorough run-through and review it.  Overall, I would say it is "wicked awesome".  To back that up, I will give the list of stand-outs and disappointments:

Stand-outs (things I thought were great):

• HD - Many have already called the 360 the "killer app" for HD.  I would agree. There are lots of people getting HD sets and then watching SD, or ED (enhanced definition (480p)) on them and thinking that's as good as it gets.  Let me tell you, just firing up the dashboard in 1080i is a sight to behold.  Call of Duty looks just incredible.
• Connectedness - You can connect to the internet out of the box and download arcade games, movie trailers, game demos, and lots of other cool stuff like themes and such.  Viewing movie trailers in HD is pretty fantastic. It was incredibly easy to migrate my live account.  The new gamercard stuff with reputation, achievements, gamerscore, etc is sweet.  They've definitely been able to build upon the experience they got from XBox Live, and Sony will have a hard time matching the experience, having never seemed to "get" the online experience on the PS2.
• The Dashboard - This has received quite a bit of thought.  It's actually a useful thing now.  You can actually do stuff from here now.  Your friends list is always at your fingertips, you can play your music, either ripped from a CD, or on your PC, or iPod (the iPod support is very nice).  The arcade rocks.  Geometry Wars is definitely worth the ~8 buck download.   The marketplace is interesting, and I think we'll start seeing lots of cool stuff there soon.  Being able to jump into the dashboard at the touch of a button is great.  Built in voice chat also rocks, and is great for organizing a foray into Halo with your friends.
• Backwards Compatibility - Interestingly enough, I don't own any 360 games yet.  Halo 2 runs beautifully in 1080i thanks to the wonderfully implemented backwards compatibility.  I think this is more impressive to someone who knows the technical details of what's going on under the covers. (running code compiled for an entirely different architecture in a virtually transparent way)  The fact that the compatibility list is still growing because they can continue to update it to handle more and more games is also fantastic.
• Controls - The controllers are fantastic.  They are an improvement over the already wonderful "S" controller for the XBox.  Wireless connectivity is the icing on the cake.  USB connections for wired controllers (and MP3 players and who knows what else) was an excellent choice over a proprietary connection.  Being able to turn the console on and off from the controller is awesome.  The optional USB charge kit for the wireless controller is pretty cool as well and has a very long cord if you're low on batteries.
• Notifications - You get cool notifications at pretty much any time (with the exception of Backwards Compat mode) to let you know when friends jump online, or when you get an invite, etc.  I assume this is "shell" type functionality now rather than being part of the game code.  That gives everything a nice, unified feel.

Disappointments:

• DVD playback - I was hoping to retire my DVD player and use the 360 for playback.  Sadly, that will not happen.  There doesn't appear to be any DTS capability.  Also, it would not play the Dolby Digital track on one DVD I put in and just gave me Dolby Pro-Logic decoding from the stereo track.  There is no aspect ratio zooming to correct non-anamorphic or 4x3 DVDs.  I does play at 480p, but I was hoping it would up-convert to 1080i (I've got a rear-projection CRT and I only wanted to worry about geometry/convergence for a single mode).  Now, there may be settings to change these things, but I could not find them.  I would gladly retract this if someone can prove me wrong.  I supposed they could also update the software in the future.
• The headset - The headset that came with mine did not work well.  There is tons of static whenever the wire moves. I think it is a defect since my friend's seems to work OK.  I'll have to take it apart to see if there is a bad connection somewhere.  Luckily, my old headset (as well as any other "cell phone style" headset) works great, but without built-in volume and mute.  Speaking of mute, it is now a switch (instead of a button with an indicator light).  It is much harder to see you are muted when you're in the heat of battle.  Beyond that, they have "built-in" the voice support to the controller, rather than making it a separate module.  This is a good thing, but there were some things about the "old way" I really liked.  The old way, I could remove the voice module and then voices would play through the main speakers.  My friends and I used this in Halo to indicate that we were "away" (the voice icon changes) but would be back (so we could do things like get a drink or visit the restroom).  Now, maybe with wireless controllers, this isn't necessary since I can technically keep the headset on.  I haven't fully explored the possibilities with wireless.
• Video playback - It appears that you have to have a Media Center PC in order to watch your own videos.  That stinks.  What about my friends that have Macs? What's so different about video? I can view my own photos and listen to my own music.  Perhaps they simply don't want to deal with the codec issue.  I may be wrong about that too, but I couldn't get it to work.  I guess I'll have to turn one of my PC's into a media center. Scott says it works great.
• Dashboard downloads - You don't seem to be able to do other stuff while you're downloading stuff in the dashboard.  HD movie trailers take a while (why don't they buffer and stream?) and you're just sitting there watching a progress bar while they download.  That seems pretty silly to me.  When it's done, you get a neat little "done downloading Xxxxx" notification. "Duh, of course it's done. I can't go do anything else but sit here and watch it download".

Overall, it totally rocks.  Go get one if you can find it.  I'll probably pick up this Logitech remote with some Christmas gift cards.