One thing the article forgot to mention is that the Hypervisor based approach used in the Xbone is a drag on performance. The Hypervisor in Xbone is a cut-down version of Microsoft's Hyper-V.
From Microsoft's own testing, Hyper-V slows down a system compared to a native OS environment:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768536%28v=bts.10%29.aspx
The following list summarizes the overhead associated with specific resources when running guest operating systems on Hyper-V virtual machines:
CPU Overhead
The CPU overhead associated with running a guest operating system in a Hyper-V virtual machine was found to range between 9 and 12%. For example, a guest operating system running on a Hyper-V virtual machine typically had available 88-91% of the CPU resources available to an equivalent operating system running on physical hardware.
Memory Overhead
The memory cost associated with running a guest operating system on a Hyper-V virtual machine was observed to be approximately 300 MB for the hypervisor, plus 32 MB for the first GB of RAM allocated to each virtual machine, plus another 8 MB for every additional GB of RAM allocated to each virtual machine. For more information about allocating memory to guest operating systems running on a Hyper-V virtual machine, see the Optimizing Memory Performance section in Optimizing Performance on Hyper-V.
Network Overhead
Network latency directly attributable to running a guest operating system in a Hyper-V virtual machine was observed to be less than 1 ms and the guest operating system typically maintained a network output queue length of less than one. For more information about measuring the network output queue length, see the Measuring Network Performance section in Measuring Performance on Hyper-V.
Disk Overhead
When using the pass-through disk feature in Hyper-V, disk I/O overhead associated with running a guest operating system in a Hyper-V virtual machine was found to range between 6 and 8 %. For example, a guest operating system running on Hyper-V typically had available 92-94% of the disk I/O available to an equivalent operating system running on physical hardware as measured by the open source disk performance benchmarking tool IOMeter.
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Now, the version of Hyper-V used in the Xbone will be cut-down & optimized for the Xbone H/W and it will have better performance than the full version of Hyper-V. However, there is no possible way for Microsoft to make the performance overhead zero. Even if Microsoft gets it down to a few percentage points, that's an overhead that the PC or PS4 don't have.
