But what's up with these odd-sized price drops?

According to this Circuit City flyer posted at Joystiq, each version of the 360 is getting a different price reduction.

That just seems dumb to me, and unnecessarily complicated.

While I would have liked to have seen $100 price cuts across the board, $50 per console would have been fine, too.

But this mix-and-match pricing strategy seems likely only to confuse shoppers.

Is the $349 premium still a better deal than the $279 core? Well, let me go look at the hard drives, calculate the price difference, carry the one, add the square root of 3...

And while MS is carefully non-denying the imminent death of the core, I believe this is basically a clearance sale on the core, just as Sony is doing with the 60-gig PS3.