If we're serious about this for a minute we can come to a couple obvious conclusions.
1. Brand Awareness: The Xbox 360 is not known as the MICROSOFT Xbox 360; the Xbox portion carries the weight of recognition, so it absolutely has to stay. Over the past several years, "playing Xbox" has become the generic phrase for playing any videogame, just as "playing Nintendo" was for most of our lives. It will be called Xbox ____.
2. Brand Confusion: There cannot be any wordplay or reference to 360. Nintendo has shown us all that you have to push a new name or the average consumer will be confused (their overall marketing was also a huge problem, but that's another discussion for another day). As such, it cannot be called Xbox 365 or Xbox Live.
3. Competition: It cannot be called Xbox 3. This creates confusion with the 360 name and is a smaller number than the 4 that Sony is pushing (personally, I thought Orbis was kind of a cool name). I realize that a product seeming inferior because it has a smaller number attached to it than a competing product is asinine, but the average consumer is asinine.
So where does that leave us? Well, Xbox Infinity is probably the front runner of everything I've seen. Sure, it's a boring name, but it's not confusing. It suggests an entirely new product with a wide range of functionality, limitless functionality, in fact. We already know that Microsoft wants to continue to expand media applications and this name fits well with that. The biggest downside is that the name is very generic and infinity gets attached to the next big thing on a daily basis.
Those are my two cents.
-n
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