Dylan Greene dot com

Hard drive or no hard drive, the XBOX 2 will likely have some sort of large local storage for storing downloads, game data, and saved games. 

Here's two idea I had that would further take advantage of the XBOX's local storage: 

Instant Game Swapping:

You're playing a game, and then your friends come over and watch to play some other game.  You aren't near a save spot and you don't want to loose your progress.  Instant Game Swap would copy the current memory contents to the XBOX hard drive so that when you put that game back in, it loads the memory from the hard drive and you can continue from exactly where you were.

Instant Hibernation:

You're playing a game and it's time to go to school, work, dinner, your wedding, whatever, and you're not at a convenient point at which to save.  Instant Hibernate would copy the memory contents to the hard drive so you can comfortably know that your game will be exactly the way you left it.

These features are not new in the PC world - Emulators such as Virtual PC and VMware let you do the equivalent of Instant Game Swapping to swap operating systems, and laptops have been doing hibernation for years.  Car and portable CD players have these same features so that you can turn your car off and on and not loose your place on the CD.  The fact that it is automatic part of what makes it so nice.

I don't think these features will make or break the XBOX 2, but I bet they would raise the bar for expectations of all gaming systems.