It's supposed to be an open hackable plateform so you can root it easily and even hack the hardware. So that mean you can add RAM, a more powerful video card, use your own controller. Even if you're not a hacker, it comes with a USB port so you can plug-in your usb stick or your 1Tb external hard drive if you need a secondary storage. Also, regular people don't need all that extra stuff or know they exist.
It sort of defeats the point of the console if it has to be hacked to add more RAM to make it usable. Might as well buy a PC. I want the console base system to be powerful enough to make developers happy to develop on it and enable a variety of apps that can be developed.
I never said you had to add more RAM to make it usable. This will run Android games so 1G of RAM is more than enough as you'll only run one game at a time. But if you want more RAM, it's possible. And as already mentioned, it comes with twice more RAM than the xbox and ps3.
It's not very clear what part of the system will be open source but if the whole OS and their layer on top are, you could re-install it on anything and replace any part of the hardware.
My concern is how future-proof will the device be. Will the base platform be powerful enough to support apps that developers will want to develop for it? You can't tell people to hack their console just to run your protein-folding program. I want this console to disrupt the market. People are itching to develop for a popular console. Developers, developers, developers!
There has to be enough RAM to future-proof it for the next 5 years. That's the lifetime of a console before a new version comes out. I don't want them to be releasing newer consoles each year with more RAM and capabilities, resulting in a fragmented software market.
Why would the lifetime of a $99 console be 5 years? At that price, they could release new ones faster. Also, as it will run on Android, games from previous generations will run on the new one.
