XNA: For Beginners or No?

Dennis, the senior software engineer for Cecropia, makes any interesting analysis of the XNA tools on his blog.

My young programmer mind boils down his post to two things:

1)  He doesn’t like that XNA is a propritary API

2)  He doesn’t like that you have to pay to run the applications on a 360

I understand the concerns about XNA being proprietary.  Me learning XNA is not going to help me learn a whole lot about C++ in order to later code for Nintendo’s systems.  However, me learning XNA is, in fact, helping me learn C# and, to an extent, JAVA.  Giving a geek the opportunity to code for a gaming system, no matter which one, is motivation enough to learn.