Xbox 360 Backwards Compatibility

Well, Microsoft's Xbox 360 E3 Event is over and the biggest announcemnent to come out of it is backwards compatibility!! But what does this mean? Hopefully it means that Xbox Media Center's codebase will be able to travel along to the 360 as soon as homebrew code is able to be executed on it. And development will be able to be moved to the new platform with little or no effort. But there seems to be more to the story after reading this comment from Engadget:

Two words: backwards compatability! That’s right, everyone. It’ll play Xbox games! (Well, some of them, anyway)

So what does this mean? To me it sounds like there WILL be a compatibility layer added in order to allow legacy games and code to be executed on the new architecture. Remember, Xbox is x86 and Xbox 360 is PowerPC. Two totally different architectures. Since the 360 has around triple to quadruple the power of the Xbox, emulation shouldn't be much of a problem. But this could also mean that any hooks or tricks in the Xbox that the Xbmc team was able to utilize have been closed up or simply don't exist anymore. All of this of course remains to be seen, and there is still plenty to do with Xbmc on our current console. The Xbmc team is great, I'm sure all the code is completely modularized anyways and ready for some porting at any time :)

So for now everyone.. just be excited. Xbox's should be going for about $50 used in a few weeks to months. And what a powerful box that is for $50. Media centers for EVERYONE! I know what everyone's getting next year for christmas.