Not all games bought in the eShop are going to be retail games costing 40 quid. There's going to be plenty of quality titles cheaper than that from indie developers, and I really can't understand how you can say that a 10% discount over 2 years without the need for a subscription is in any way a bad thing.
There's no subscription but you need to spend an extra fifty quid up front?
Um. Let me think about it...
No thanks.
I buy a lot of indie and arcade games online on the 360. Probably dozens of them a year. Adds up to a lot of hard drive space and not much cash, truth be told. Would I want to save 10%? Yes, of course I would. I'd be nice to have that £5 or so in my pocket. Worth paying an extra fifty quid for? Not a chance.
And flash drives on the 360..? You're limited to 2 x 16GB maximum and they're more expensive and slower than SDHC cards as far as I remember.
Just double checked, flash drives are cheaper but slower 
What's SDHC cards got to do with anything, and why do you have the impression they're better than flash drives?
And have you really just boasted you could get a 32gb card for the U, then criticised the 360 for only taking 2x16gb?
To all intents and purposes SDHC and flash are the same price and the same speed. There's different classes and speeds of both, of course, but in terms of accessing your game they're probably all about the same speed to a console - and most will be faster than accessing a disk. Which is why large amounts of storage is important if you're bothered about speed.
Are you bothered about speed? You seem to be bringing it up as an important factor, here, but the difference for a console reading data from a dvd, a flash drive, a hard drive or an SDHC card is likely insignificant.
I generally don't install games to my hard drive, on the 360. It's an option on pretty much every game, and it speeds access up a bit, but unless you're going to be playing a game for months who can be arsed with spending a few minutes installing a game just so it saves a few seconds here and there.
Even without installing games to HDD, though, I found my old 60gb drive was always full. These days 100gb is an absolute minimum when it comes to console hard drives, and more realistically you want at least 250gb. (That wouldn't be very forward thinking, though - it'd fill way too quickly.)
No, as I originally said, whether you buy an 8gb model or a 32gb model effectively makes no difference. Either way you're going to need to plug an external HDD in.
Have also noticed that we're finally seeing a platform holder selling an HD console with an HDMI cable included. 
Really wasn't expecting that.
I didn't realise that. Wow! I nearly spuffed in my pants at that news. Definite system seller!
Oh yeah - just realised. I've got 6 in use and 3 spares in a drawer. Eight of those cost less than a quid each. The other one's a more niche cable (having a right angled connector) so I paid £2.07 for it...
