Natal doesn't have buttons and probably never will. 'nuff said.
Want more? Fine. At least the wii remote (even when shown alone, before the nunchuk) had buttons. Done.
No, but seriously, it was still something that gamers could wrap their heads around, but still also odd enough to be curious about. The point is there was something there to speculate on. The thought process was "well we know it has buttons and a D-pad, but how will it offer analog control? We know it'll have IR controls for 'pixel perfect accuracy' so maybe certain types of games will play like DS stylus controlled games...?" There was something there we could understand, and the stuff we didn't we could speculate on. It was easy to come up with what would be blue ocean games, like wiisports, would be like; "oh hey you can use it to swing a bat, like baseball!" and we had to question what core games like Mario/Zelda would play like...
Now, take what we know about Natal (meant to be used WITHOUT a controller, at all. None.) and couple that with what Microsofts intentions for it are (a means to cater to the "casual" grandma crowd) and what we're left wondering is:
-How will this work for core games? FPS specifically (being the seamingly dominant genre on the xbox brand)
-Will this even be used at ALL for core games?
-Will this become a standard feature of the xbox? Something that'll be packed in with a future console?
It just seems that with Wii, it was either something ya understood right away, or didn't. With Natal.. no one seems to "get it" yet. Couple that with Microsofts intentions and its hard NOT to be skeptical about the whole thing.