I wouldn't say useless :). From what I see, if you are not a licensed dev for the 360 you cannot add in xbox-live support. Other things like not being able to distribute copies as easily seems like its more of an 'incomplete' thing rather than a hobbist restriction.
Crap. At the rate I'm going, by the time I finished a XBox 360 app, the XBox 720 will be out.
Looks like the day has finally come that you won't need to dig into the guts of a machine to produce 'top end' apps and games.
This day occurred quite some time ago. .Net is a beautiful thing.
It's going to be the basis of many next gen game engines. As far as I've heard just about everyone and their grandmother is porting their tools to XNA.
This is something I don't really understand. Managed DirectX has been available since Direct X 9 came out. There really is no "porting" involved. XNA is an abstraction/framework/"easier than Direct X API" sitting on top of a stripped down version of MDX9 (to compensate for short comings of the XBox 360 vs. Windows). In short, it's a couple .Net application templates utilizing a neutered version of MDX. It's a lot like (and dare I say a step toward competition to) the tools that are being "ported to it" (such as Torque X)
How long do you suppose it will be before Garage Games is absorbed by Microsoft and turned into their "budget" game wing?