Get the premium $399 Xbox 360 at Toys R Us and get a free $100 gift card - that will just about get you a year of Xbox Live and a free game. Best deal I've seen to date, ends the 24th.
Yeah, this one put me over the edge. I was gonna wait for the first 360 price drop, but that would have only ended up being $50. All Toys R Us in St. Louis are completely sold out of the premium unit though, had to have some relatives back home get one for me lol. I also read that MS is now extending all 360 warranties to one year.
Microcenter's been running a $100 MIR on both the premium and core Xbox 360 systems, and if you open up a Microcenter Visa with Worldpoints, and charge $399.99 on the first charge, you get another 13,000 worldpoints, which is good for another $100 off of the purchase, which made my Xbox 360 premium $200 after $100 MIR and $100 worldpoints refund. I think the Microcenter deal goes until 12/31/06.
I heard about that one, but there were reports of people getting used consoles. Seeing as the 360 isn't the most bug free device to begin with, I didn't want to take any chances.
I didn't get a used console, and I picked out a more recent vintage - 9/2006 (look for the boxes where the top of the box has 3 paragraphs of small print on it, those are the newer consoles, the older ones have boxes with no small print on the top of the box).