Reading that infoworld, this bit in particular...
I have to ask why XBLive! is rated as highly as the Atari 2600 and PS1? How come MS got a recognition for something that was mostly a consolidated take on conventional network gaming principles, a nice front end and unfied interface for peer-to-peer gaiming, whereas the Atari and Sony awards were for new developments in hardware with far more reaching effects on the industry, and yet Nintendo and others have got no mention despite their input? Surely the genres and 80's consoles Nintendo has come up with are worth more to the industry then XBLive!'s network gaming?
Seems like an 'easy' award to me. Not because its not worth anything to gamers, nor because it's not as technically demanding as creating a successful hardware platform, but because I think there's industry players who have achieved a lot more.
Though if there's a category for network gaming I guess XBLive! would win by default, being pretty much the only contender