As an author of one of the comments that apparently has made people so upset, I guess I should respond.

I don't see what your problem with my comment was. I provided a short list of clearly stated arguments why I believe their price point is unfounded and will impair their ability to ship a product, and why the price point (along with the marketing) suggests an incomplete knowledge of the problems they're attempting to address.

Why does this matter? Two reasons:

First, every large Kickstarter that takes money and fails to deliver will be an enormous hit to the viability of crowd-funding in general, and potentially increase the difficulties faced by other crowd-funded projects in terms of convincing backers to wait patiently for release. If something like the Ouya collects $3M in kickstarter funding and flames out violently, you can bet there will be lawyers lining up to file class action suits. Once this happens, the doors are probably open for harmful actions against all sorts of crowd-funded projects. This is all the more troublesome because game projects are in general troubled projects, so adding the spectre of legal threats isn't exactly going to improve things.

Second, the degree to which the project feels slapped together or not well thought out suggests a potential to cause harmful effects on the development community and the way game players engage with it. While from a revenue perspective, the modern wave of free-to-play and Facebook games is a tremendous thing - making plenty of people rich - the social effects are yet to be fully understood. The mechanics heavily leveraged by these games are, to the extent they are understood by psychology and testing, not harmless and in some cases extremely harmful to the players over both the short and long term. The business models behind these games fundamentally encourage building around singular players spending to the limit of their ability (or beyond it), and use the kind of abusive terminology previously used in casinos and the development of slot machines. Now there are even companies trying to convince game developers to use their middleware to turn their games into actual slot machines where players gamble real money.

Ouya's push is heavily predicated on it being about free to play games, the vast majority of which fall into the previously described category - destructive and built on psychological manipulation. The low price point means that Ouya would be the perfect choice for lower-income families that would otherwise not consider buying an expensive game console, and the emphasis on Android games being 'cheap' means that the majority of the games out there will be free downloads or a $1 purchase with the intent of getting players onto the microtransaction treadmill. I do not think this sort of future is good for anyone except investors (though in the short term, developers will benefit tremendously).

So I suppose yes, You could say that I "don't get it": I don't get why you would decide to abuse your entire customer base for short term profit at the expense of long term market health.

Some of the anger and dismissiveness in comments probably is, as you say, just about how it's android or about how it's open source or about how it was crowdfunded instead of VCd, or whatever. None of that is really a concern for me, as a person who doesn't own any Apple devices, hates OS X, uses an Android phone, develops open source projects, and hasn't ever been given a cent by venture capitalists or angel investors. I still think Ouya is probably going to be a bad thing unless the people running the project make a serious effort to curtail the potential for it to cause negative consequences for the industry as a whole.