Alot of stores turn their Kiosks off to stop loitering. In reality very few Xbox's have broke. As for choppy frames, thats on every system. Perfect example is Nascar Heat 2002 on PS2, CHOPPY, on the Xbox its not choppy. Its called piss poor development. Halo is not choppy there are two slow downs, but nothing under 15-20 fps, and playing with 8 people in multiplayer, no choppiness there either.
Also I have a big beef with some of the gamespot reviews, if you play the games you can tell Gamespot DID not play some of them, or played it for a couple hours and decided that was enough. Perfect example again is Nascar Heat 2002. They say you don't have to break. Obviously they only played the super speedways and not the likes of Bristol or Watkins Glen, both you HAVE TO BREAK or you will be slamming into other cars and/or the wall. Either that or they played in the easy mode which, the game does all the breaking for you... There are other reviews that seem a bit off from my experiances too...
Did I mention the fact that EVERY PS2 port to Xbox, which has improved graphics/more level/fixed gameplay has consistently gotten LOWER scores when compared to the PS2 game, and some of these games have come out a month or two apart. Same goes for the GC, all the multiplatform games which like the Xbox have improvements, get lower scores. Nascar Heat 2002, Nascar Thunder 2002, Madden 2002, suprisingly NBA Live 2002 got an equal score to the PS2 version. I bet MGSX and Crash X, GTA3 all get lower scores on the Xbox too...
And look at Dark Summit, Reviewed 5 days apart, the reviewers claim that the Xbox version is only worthy of a 7.1 while the PS2 supposedly has better graphics and is worthy of a 7.8. WTF? Atleast dont appear to be biased...