I really do not get all this requirement to have Media Center Edition installed. Makes no sense to me. Typical MS. They do something and more times than not, it ends up being crippled by requiring some other element you may not have, really need, or want.
There is no valid reason why the 360 shouldn't be able to use XP (or any system for that matter) to draw data from.
I suspect we'd end up needing someone to write some sort of MCE emulator layer to fake the 360 into thinking it's talking with MCE but is really talking with any other OS.
Think about it. Why should the 360 care where the data is coming from as long as it's formatted correctly?
Forcing us all to run Media Center Edition when we have no interest in using our PC for recording TV and such makes little sense to me.
Then there's the whole Vista question. Is the 360 really going to be less functional under Vista or is Vista going to essentially include MCE-like hooks. If so, then clearly MCE is not, at the core, truly required. It sounds like it's just a current limitation just begging for someone to figure out a way around.
I'm told that music streamed from a MCE system includes things like album art and the like. We had all that with XMC streaming from any source on the older Xbox. God this annoys me.