Not really the same though, since the XBox OS fully resides in Flash/ROM/however-you-want-to—call-it-internal-storage 16MB (megabytes!) filesystem, and you can readily boot without the hard disk[0]. Those 6GB were merely "set aside".
As of November 19, 2008 the Xbox OS actually requires additional disk space. It's why they discontinued the Xbox 360 Arcade console package since it didn't come with a hard drive.
Not really the same though, since the XBox OS fully resides in Flash/ROM/however-you-want-to—call-it-internal-storage 16MB (megabytes!) filesystem, and you can readily boot without the hard disk[0]. Those 6GB were merely "set aside".
The price is a complete rip-off though.
[0] this may have changed since NXE, but the OS is still extremely small by today's standards, e.g the last one is 113MB: http://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-360/system-updates/system...