Well the Kinect is still there, and the price so far, is still there.
To be honest, I think they just made a business call upon seeing the overwhelming negative feedback towards THEM and positive feedback towards SONY. They didn't want to lose to them so they decided to drop the DRM, although I'm sure they wanted it to stay. But they just wouldn't even come close to competing with the PS4 if they kept it. And they saw that. If we are to believe that Sony spread misinformation to make MS think they were also making a DRM machine, then MS' console was made to counter Sony's, which ended up backfiring when Sony decided to turn around and counter THEM with a DRM free machine. So they had to even the playing field back by removing their DRM, after trying to stick to their guns for a while, and even suggesting those who don't like it should just buy the 360. After all, this means increased development cost now. They still might not make back their expenditures. Since theres the Xboned development, the extra development being put into adjusting the system due to those issues it was having, and now the dev cost of removing the DRM from the planning. Since clearly, that was not going to be the big "everyone's doing it" feature of the next generation.