Xbox – Why has Microsoft not allowed browsing for the 360

I had to take some time to look this up (and plug things into my xbox) and I learned the following:

• The Xbox 360 will accept keyboard and mouse input (I'm actually guessing on the mouse as it didn't do anything, but the 360 didn't complain).
• This input is different in nature than the controller (thus you can't use it to play Halo for example)
• You can use this to type into the Xbox Dashboard in any Text Input field.

I dug deeper into the XNA api and found the following:

• The XNA Keyboard class provides different Enum from the Xbox controller
• There is no explicit cast between the two (though a developer could write one)
• The Keyboard and Controller are polled differently (so a developer must poll it separately from the Controller)
• Because of the previous point, there is no built in way to associate a keyboard hooked into the 360 with an account without explicitly doing so (ie. the api doesn't handle this for you).

I hope this helps.

As far as I know you will be able to play any games already purchased and/or sent along. Xbox Live may be a problem, but as far as I understand, it's only a problem for buying new games on the marketplace, not for playing already purchased game.