Kids, oh ye of little faith. This thread reminds me of the thinking of the scene before the LBA48 patch came out. I remeber it being standard thinking that 137GB was the maximum HDD partiiton size the xbox would be able to use, therefore you were stuck with it. Then PaulB came around with all his awsomness, played around with a few variables and BOOM overnight the general consensious changed here. MS deployed expensive and hardware extensive security on the first Xbox, granted it was unlike the 360's security and an after thought, however it was still broken.
If there is one thing Bunnie should have taught the scene is if the security is crackable, then it should be crackable with cheap parts. You don't need million dollar equipment if you know what you are doing, and have the steps to reverse engineer the beast properly. It all comes down to the motivation, look at how far Bunnie went and the recognition he got from his work. Many are already suggesting that a physical dissection of the CPU may be needed, but regardless if the primary boot code is executed from within the CPU or not may not matter if the CPU has a thousand or so pins that could be communicated to.
To make a long story short, don't sell yourselves so damn short. Even if you disagree with the above, this scene did not become 200,000+ members strong by failure. If you can already accept a save game exploit boot loader as a means for loading unsigned code as second nature then imagine what the future will bring.