Microsoft in fact chose to show off the new non-gaming features of it's new console, which mainly involved the ability to watch live television, social interactions, and new voice controls.
For me, I really enjoyed this and I really do not understand the backlash Microsoft has received since. Personally I would have found an hour of game previews a complete bore. I know it's going to play games, because it's a fucking games console, and I know what games it's going to play and what they will look like because that's all been posted elsewhere previously. I'm not a huge gamer, but I am looking forward to Star Wars 1313 and Metal Gear Solid Ground Zero. Both of which I have already seen extended game play footage of on YouTube. If Microsoft had spent the hour showing me endless clips I had already seen, then I would have seen reason to start complaining for wasting my time.
I use my Xbox mainly for Movies, TV and Music through the likes of Netflix and Last.fm and so on, so the features shown were incredibly relevant to me and I'm sure many others that do use their console as an all round media device, as it should be, and I welcome the features that were shown and Microsoft's approach at making it 'One' device to rule them all. The days when a games console was purely for games were lost in the mid 90's when the original PlayStation played CD's, so get used to it!
I also enjoyed seeing the next generation of Kinect and some of its new features. Many serious gamers seem to slate the Kinect but its by far the best controller-alternative input method, far superior to PlayStation Move or Nintendo's tablet thing. Having it ship with every console is going to drastically improve the line up of titles available for it, giving the casual gamer a home in the Xbox world as well as giving an interesting edge to more serious games and also just a cool way to navigate around the console.
I think the keyboard warriors of the internet need to sit, chill and think for a just minute that this is a console that wont be ready for sale for at least another six months and since Sony decided this year to hold a special event of their own prior to E3, a trend many tech companies are following recently, I think that put Microsoft in a hard position to follow suit and bring something to the table in a special event of their own when a lot of their product wouldn't be ready till at least E3 in June.
I think Microsoft made a great decision to take the time to show off what non-gaming features they had ready to show off and just because something wasn't mentioned or certain pressing questions weren't answered in that small hour in no way means that it was a complete and final representation of Microsoft's entire new feature set or game plan (pardon the pun). It was simply a show of what was ready.
Critics, news reports and Facebook friends alike have since been quick to publish the worst case scenario of all unanswered questions as cold hard fact without any official statements from Microsoft. It is still unclear as to how the new system will operate, whether it will play pre-owned games or how much it will cost, and until we get any official word on those matters, the world needs to calm it's shit down and enjoy the Xbox One for what it is, a new games console from Microsoft finally after nearly the decade the 360 has been available. I know these matters are important, but with a release so far away and the console still in stages of development, I don't think Microsoft themselves know what the final plans are in order to make official statements about them.
One final thing I wanted to write about is directly towards the live TV features that were demonstrated and something that I saw get a terrible amount of criticism for. It became knowledge shortly after, that a separate box/adaptor would be required in order to make the live TV functions actually work. Again I see this as a positive and in many ways a technological inevitability but yet again, Joe Public's stupidity gets the better of them. I live in the UK, and just off the top of my head and can think of at least 6 different television providers using completely different transmission technology that we have on offer. Freeview, Freesat, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, BT Vision, all using either terrestrial, satellite or cable systems. To have just one box that would be compatible with all these systems, for every country the Xbox will ship to, would be both horrendously costly and require the Xbox itself to be much larger than could comfortably fit on a shelf. Bare in mind also the people that might not be interested in this function, it makes it much more viable to supply a separate box for the TV provider you have to keep the cost of the Xbox down and save from forcing people into paying more for stuff they might not use.
Putting everything else aside though, love or hate what Microsoft did or didn't do in their event, at least they showed us what the fucking thing looks like unlike Sony!
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