I very highly doubt that we'll be paying for BC.
If you own the game already then you've already paid for it. How exactly would MS justify charging you for it again. How would the game companies allow MS to charge people to play THEIR games. They can't justify it and they probably wont charge you.
The Emulation is at the chip level built into the GPU... therefor regardless of "profiles" (which I'll get to in a second) the emulation is being performed by HARDWARE which means that MS will be required to pay nVidia hardware royalties. This mean that more likely than not the cost of BC will be absorbed into the overall price of the console, NOT the individual games. I think that if Ms was planning on charging for BC they would not have said that the Xbox would be Backwards Compatible, but maybe "Xbox Ready". the term Backwards Compatible itself implies that there are no strings attached.
As for "game profiles"... from reading the description it sounds like it's nothing more than a config file. It just sets a few parameters for the emulator to tell it how to run more efficiently with that particular game.
I'd be willing to bet that once we crack the 360 we'll be able to modify the profiles ourselves or even write our own profiles for homebrew apps/games or whatever MS missed.
I would even go as far as to say that the 360 could probably still run games that have no profile, just not as efficiently as those that do.
I REALLY don't understand why everyone is getting so bent out of shape over this. How many of you have ever used an emulator on a PC? You know all those settings you can change to tweak how your game runs? yeah it's probably nothing more than presets of that.
