Although we’ve been reporting on Microsoft’s fairly successful Kinect launch, we still managed to find a bone to pick over Redmond’s EU pricing and bundling practices.

Microsoft is currently offering a single Kinect bundle on the European market and it’s based around the Xbox 360 Slim Arcade with 4GB of memory. Consumers who want more storage have no bundle option and, as expected, there’s no bundle based on the older and cheaper non-Slim console.

This is where the pricing issue comes up. The aforementioned bundle sells for about €290. Bought separately, a Slim Arcade with Kinect costs about the same, so there’s really no incentive to go for the bundle.

What’s worse, the older and cheaper Arcade is slowly being phased out and the Slim doesn’t offer nearly as good value for money. The old Arcade was readily available at under €150, sometimes even less. The Slim Arcade goes for €169 and in some markets it goes for as much as €189.

Microsoft simply didn’t seize the launch momentum and it failed to offer truly tempting bundles for holiday shoppers. We can only hope that we will see some better offers in the weeks to come.