oh great now i have to pay for a $1000 doller system or more!

This is unlikely. 2010 is way to early. I don't even think that MS has gone into development on the Xbox3 yet. There may be a room deep in the earth, close to the core where Sony, MS, and NIN are working on new systems, but they will not see develpment until the third year of the systme life span.
2010 we might see or here of a new Xbox coming with in the following year but thats it.
 
As far as business goes, they have these engineers who designed xbox and 360 who are done with their current projects. Now they have to start designing something new. Like a car manufacturer, they will spend the next couple of years tracking how well the 360 is going, where it can be tweaked, what can they do better next time, and what new tech can they use. Then as the market shifts they start building the better box. These things take a lot more work than whipping up some cad drawings and sending them to a factory (not that you said they would, but sometimes people don't realize all the background work that goes into stuff like that).
 
If Sony is really that fast on the trigger, they're desperately overestimating PS3 sales, especially when new versions of the PS3 are already in the works to take up market space in the mean time. This sounds very similar to a certain Japanese company known for milking a certain blue hedgehog...