What are you supposed to do if you have no Internet connectivity? You basically have a brick on your hands until you can connect it to the Internet? That's ridiculous.
Well you see, contrary to the rampant speculation you get on sites like HN, when we deployed a telemetry update to report on how many of our users have no internet connectivity, the data showed 100% of respondents had internet connectivity.
I mean, Xbox has been like this for a long time and clearly it's not dettering sales at all - and even with Windows the functionality to skip it has been well hidden and required bringing up windows console and typing in a command that rebooted the installer - hardly something that your average person would do I guess. So yeah, it's ridiculous, but Microsoft knows it will make zero difference to sales.
I own an xbox (which I received as a gift) and absolutely hate having to log into it any time I want to use it. MY 15 year old PS3 still delivers a far more pleasant user experience.
