Found first at /., Daily Radar has obtained an interview with Michael Abrash of the Microsoft Games Group. He talks a lot about why the X-Box looks so good as a development platform for him and others. For one thing, he seems to addresss some of his comments at the crowd that expect for the X-Box to be nothing more than a watered-down PC. Here's a blurb:

DR: What are some of the amazing things Xbox programmers will be able to do with the system in, say, two or three years after launch?MA: I wish I knew--but I'll have to wait and see :) Basically ask yourself what difference it would make to have 10 or 20 times as many polygons per frame as on a PC today, with parallel processing for procedural modification of vertices and pixels and with the ability to use textures for lookup tables, plus a ton of particles--I think the answer is better looking stuff, but exactly how, no one yet knows. Xbox will be easy to develop for, because of the familiar tools and programming environment, but there will still be an interesting learning curve as developers learn to push the limits of the hardware.

He also stresses that titles that are designed to take advantage of the X-Box's features (instead of just being ported like Quake) should look pretty amazing, even on an NTSC display, and then makes some comments about NTSC vs. HDTV support. It's worth a look for those on both sides of the should I buy an X-Box? argument.