As many people noted today, the XBox 360 / Microsoft press conference was yesterday. I wasn’t able to attend in person due to some last minute jockeying by G4.tv to lock out all other live video streamers from E3, and as such I missed out on getting my free XBox 360 slim (yeah, I’m not happy about that despite the “obvious ethics implications”).

Aside from wishing I could actually be there, and as pleased as I was with what was announced at the event, there are a few things that I wish they had announced.

1) Hulu on the XBox 360 Dashboard. I wouldn’t even mind if Hulu made the decision to charge me for access to it via the convenience of my console. I currently enjoy access to Hulu via a service called PlayOn. The downside to using this service, is two-fold: it requires that I have a computer that’s net-connected and on the same network segment as my XBox turned on at all times and the interface used to access Hulu is the via the text interface side, which is adaquate, but less desirable than the truly slick interface available on Hulu’s standalone client.

The fact such an announcement wasn’t made at E3 doesn’t mean it’s not coming, but it does little to further fuel the rumors such an announcement will eventually arrive.

If I were Microsoft, I’d be pretty hesitant about inking such a deal in light of the uncertainty of what will happen with a Comcast-NBCU merger/acquisition. NBC’s content is a major pillar of the Hulu community, and Comcast is unfortunately dead set on destroying the Hulu property in a vain attempt to prop up their Fancast unit.

None the less, the ESPN deal (while not targeted directly at me, a non-sports enthusiast) is major, and is a critical piece of the puzzle in compelling folks to cut the cord with their cable provider and make the XBox a central part of living room entertainment.

2) More emphasis on Natal / Kinect’s use as an alternative input device. Perhaps I’m mindful of the fact that Kinect’s limitations because I have a couple of friends incapable of jumping around due to disability, but the more exciting part of the potential of Kinect has been the idea of using it as an alternative input device.

Voice recognition and the Minority Report stuff is really revolutionary. After the announcement of the acquisition of Siri by Apple, I had a very long discussion Norman Winarsky, one of the great brains within the research institute responsible for coming up with the groundbreaking AI. Our conversation drifted, eventually, to the topic of wearable computing, and how hard it is to achieve that dream at two choke points: alternative input devices and alternative output devices. The talk of affordable and powerful wearable displays is only going to result in technology available to consumers pretty far down the line, and the development of an alternative input device seems to have dead-ended with the ill-fated Twiddler.

Exploring the possibilities of creating a new input device accessible to the mainstream via the XBox 360 is a big deal, and they didn’t spend enough time talking about that.

3) Fable III.  Come on – if you’ve played any of the Fable series, you know how revolutionary that game was for the RPG genre. If you want to talk about innovations in bringing RPGs to a mainstream audience, certainly Square-Enix deserves its place in history, but the Fable franchise took the commonly accepted practices for developing an RPG and turned them on their head (and arguably paved the way for other smash hits like Mass Effect).

That revolution was created by one of the big names in gaming, Peter Molyneux, who’s responsible for other groundbreaking games like Populous, the Theme Park franchise, Dungeon Keeper, and Black & White. He’s now in the stable of talent at Microsoft via Lion Head Entertainment.

4) Better presentation. Did you see Joel McHale present at the Ubisoft event? Perhaps it’s his unique style of delivery that made it come off sounding true to company vision without sounding like a total shill, but after almost an hour and a half, I was really tired of hearing Microsoft employees reading off a teleprompter while sounding like they were reading off a teleprompter. This is the company that had the enigmatically charismatic Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld on a multi-million dollar TV ad campaign, but they can’t afford a single B-List celebrity (many of which frequently voice characters on Microsoft games) for their E3 presentation a stone’s throw from Hollywood.

5) Disallowing exclusive media buyouts. This one is personal and probably isolated to me, but since I’m directly impacted, I’ll mention it here – giving G4 TV an “exclusive broadcast right” to the press conference video coverage is stupid. The deal G4 struck with EA, Bioware and Microsoft is directly responsible for me staying home during E3, since we were then unable to set up our cameras and #theCube at the show. It doesn’t make sense from a journalistic perspective, and it doesn’t make common sense either.  A press conference (traditionally) is an event open to journalists to be briefed on the subject matter at hand. Since this is the first year I’ve attempted to do live video coverage of E3, I don’t know if this is common practice or not, but stinks to high heaven to me (far more so than the “bribe” Microsoft gave the attendees in the form of a new XBox).