Yeah, kinda like that. If you're curious;

http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/proj/anatak/xboxmod.html

http://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf

The PDF has the full story, the first link has some neat photos including die shots.

Then its easily in reach of average hobbyist. You dont need anything super expensive, the one I linked was done using $30 FPGA board.

Good lord, are FPGA's that cheap now? I remember the absolute bargain-basement slow-as-bricks FPGA board running $100.

one used in my link ~$35

http://www.ebay.com/itm/XC3S500E-XILINX-Spartan-3E-FPGA-Eval...

smallerr one $16 free shipping

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ALTERA-FPGA-Cyslonell-EP2C5T144-Mini...

programming dongle ~$5 http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Blaster-Programmer-Cable-For-FPG...

We live in amazing times for hardware developers. Stuff that was out of reach 10 years ago is peanuts right now.

Kinda. There's a huge price split depending on if you just need GPIO or if you need transceivers (serial above 1GHz). If you just need GPIO $30 is reasonable. If you need transceivers, $300 would be a bargain.