Ars Technica‘s Kyle Orland:
The actual PS4 casing, whatever it looks like, isn’t really going to be that important to the way you actually experience the console. Like every console that’s come before it, the PlayStation 4 is going to be a box that sits in your entertainment center. You’ll interact with it directly for maybe five seconds while you put in a disc and turn the system on (even less if you download games and use the power button on the controller). After that, you’ll be ignoring the casing for hours as you stare at the images on the TV screen—you know, the kind of images that Sony actually made the focus of its announcement last week.
There’s been many ‘why we should have/shouldn’t have seen the box’ arguments, but Kyle’s resonates the most with my viewpoint. Compared to so many other factors – price, game selection, UI, to name a few – the look of the box is pretty unimportant.